QI

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QI, standing for Quite Interesting, is a comedy panel game shown on BBC Two and BBC Four and was hosted by Stephen Fry, until Series M, now hosted by Sandi Toksvig with permanent panellist Alan Davies.

Series One [A]

Episode A.01 "Adam"

[On the subject of Adam and Eve]

Stephen Fry: But perhaps, you know, we should believe in Adam and Eve. Geneticists have established that every woman in the world shares a single female ancestor who lived a hundred and fifty thousand years ago. Scientists actually call her "Eve", and every man shares a single male ancestor called "Adam". It's also been established, however, that Adam was born eighty thousand years after Eve. So the world before him was one of heavy to industrial-strength lesbianism, one assumes.

[After a question concerning Burmese etiquette]

Stephen Fry: While double-checking this ... on the Internet, we came up with the extraordinary information that it's considered polite to express joy by eating snow and to send unwanted guests away by biting their leg, an normal behaviour to wipe your mouth on the sofa. This is actually true, the researchers were wrtiting this down with great excitement about Burma, only to discover in the end that Burma turned out to be the name of a poodle belonging to the author of the website

Stephen Fry: Now, why... Hugh?

Hugh Laurie: Yes?

Stephen Fry: Why does the actor Edward Woodward have 4 Ds in his name?

[There’s a long pause until John Sessions hits his buzzer.]

Hugh Laurie: Well... No! What are you doing?

John Sessions: I'm sorry!

Hugh Laurie: What are you doing?

Hugh Laurie: He can’t do that!

John Sessions: I'm sorry. It was a spasm.

John Sessions: I’ll put it out. Just carry on.

Alan Davies: Did you know, this is quite interesting...

Stephen Fry: Yes, good. That’s what we’re here for.

Alan Davies: Did you know, kiwi fruit uses more than its own weight in aviation fuel to get from New Zealand to Europe?

Stephen Fry: Another 5 points. It sounds mad, but is of course true. Absolutely.

Alan Davies: And regarding the Edward Woodward...

Stephen Fry: Yes?

Alan Davies: That’s how you spell it!

Stephen Fry: Oh, no, let Hugh... Poor Hugh.

Hugh Laurie: No really, that’s fine. I was gonna say exactly that. It’s got that many Ds in it, cos that’s his name! If you took the Ds out, it would be a different name.

Alan Davies: Ewar Woowar!

Hugh Laurie: Ewar Woowar.

Stephen Fry: Exactly. It would be Ewar Woowar. It’s a sort of structural device, like a joist, which stops his name collapsing into the sort of spongey mass of Ewar Woowar.

Stephen Fry: What would you do with a pencil and a lesser anteater?

Alan Davies: Oh, hours of fun.

Episode A.02 "Astronomy"

Stephen Fry: Where is ninety percent of the universe? Jeremy?

Jeremy Hardy: Ikea.

Jeremy Hardy: You're basing all this on what Stephen Hawking says, and the fact is, he's subject to interference from minicabs.

Alan Davies: I nearly injured myself the other day.

Stephen Fry: Oh yes?

Alan Davies: I was standing...

Stephen Fry: This is a not quite interesting?

Alan Davies: I was standing at the urinal and it was so high I had to stand on tip toe, and I nearly pulled a muscle in the hamstring area. It must have been a really really lanky plumber who put it up.

Stephen Fry: It must have been.

Bill Bailey: You were in a giant’s toilet.

Alan Davies: Stumbled into a giant's loo.

Jeremy Hardy: Might have been a fountain.

Bill Bailey: It was a font in a church.

Alan Davies: It was outdoors... [Realising what Bill said.] I was not weeing in a font! I resent that.

Bill Bailey: I baptise you... oh, stop that. Distguting.

Stephen Fry: How many moons does the earth have?

Alan Davies: It has... [He gets distracted for a moment by his buzzer, which is now a chicken.]

Stephen Fry: Yeah?

Alan Davies: The earth has one moon which is made of cheese.

Stephen Fry: Ooohhh.

[The klaxon sounds.]

Stephen Fry: So you lose 10.

Alan Davies: But it does have one moon!

Stephen Fry: No.

Alan Davies: It’s called ‘The Moon’! I rest my case.

[About Cruithne, assumed to be Earth's second moon]

Rich Hall: Who comes up with this shit? So you're telling me there's a second moon?

Stephen Fry: There... I am!

Jeremy Hardy: "Blue moon, I saw you standing alone." Not "with a small friend."

Rich Hall: So why is there, uh... why is there not one romantic song with the word "Cruithne" in it? Why not "Blue Cruithne of Kentucky," or "Cruithne River," or--

Alan Davies: No one can see it--

Stephen Fry: BECAUSE IT WAS DISCOVERED IN NINETEEN-NINETY-[bleep]-FOUR!

Rich Hall: 9 years! 9 years to write a romantic song with the word ‘Cruithne’ in it.

Stephen Fry: In the last 9 years, no romantic songs, as far as I know, have been written at all. Have they?

Alan Davies: Bryan Adams wrote one.

Stephen Fry: Oh, please!

Bill Bailey: ‘Everything I Do, I Do It For Cruithne?’

Stephen Fry: How many planets are there in the solar system?

Alan Davies: Nine.

[The klaxon goes off.]

Stephen Fry: Oh, sorry. Not again. [He holds up the ‘nine’ card.] Nine. Not the right answer, another forfeit of 10, I’m afraid. I’m afraid the answer is actually eight.

Alan Davies: I’m gonna write them down. You carry on.

Stephen Fry: Alright. Okay.

Alan Davies: Mars.

Stephen Fry: Yes, Mars is one.

Alan Davies: Pluto.

Stephen Fry: No.

[Alan stops writing and looks up at Stephen.]

Rich Hall: Here we go again.

Alan Davies: Pluto is a planet! It was discovered in the 1930s. It was the most recent planet to be discovered.

Stephen Fry: It was discovered by Clive Tombaugh in 1930 exactly, yes.

Bill Bailey: It’s a collection of gasses, it’s not actually...

Stephen Fry: It’s not a planet. By no criterion by which planets are judged could Pluto be said...

Alan Davies: It’s really, really big and it goes around the sun!

Stephen Fry: Yes, but it’s not really that big at all. It’s tiny.

Alan Davies: Well, that’s why it took so long to find! Don’t be hard on it cos it’s small!

Alan Davies: Pluto and Bangkok don’t exist. I’m scared to go out.

Alan Davies: Is gay whispers like Chinese whispers

Stephen Fry: Much more fun, I assure you, much more fun.

Episode A.03 "Aquatic Animals"

Stephen Fry: Holmes was retired by this point, and was keeping bees on the Sussex Downs.

Alan Davies: Against their will?

Stephen Fry: What begins with A, has six Cs, and no Bs?

Clive Anderson: Is it the Welsh alphabet?

Alan Davies: I’ve got that in my pond, I get rid of it.

Stephen Fry: No. Think about how many people you kill by doing that. You might just as well go around with a pillow and just clamp them to old lady’s faces. You bastard.

Episode A.04 "Atoms"

Stephen Fry: What is the most boring place in Britain?

Jo Brand: Is it the Big Brother House?

Alan Davies: Charlton Heston played Michelangelo?

Stephen Fry: Yes, you know, and—

Alan Davies: The effete Italian homosexual?

Stephen Fry: Yes, that's the one, he was not effete—

Alan Davies: Played by the president of the gun club?

Stephen Fry: He was an athletic Italian homosexual-

Alan Davies: I thought he was a wussy one!

Stephen Fry: He may well have preferred man-on-man action, that doesn't mean he was Julian Clary! He was butch, like me!

Episode A.05 "Advertising"

Stephen Fry: Welcome to QI, the closest modern equivalent to Lions versus Christians.

Stephen Fry: And Alan goes...

[Alan hits his buzzer, and the klaxon goes off, flashing ‘hopeless’ behind him.]

Stephen Fry: Minus 10 to Alan already before we’ve even begun our first round.

Stephen Fry: How do otters kill crocodiles?

Rob Brydon: Softly with their songs.

Episode A.06 "Antidotes"

[Danny Baker has related a theory that states if a person can lick their own elbow, then they will be immortal.]

Stephen Fry: But isn't that how socialism was invented, that someone said, "Come, let us lick each other's elbows"?

Danny Baker: The fourth largest navy in the world, if one goes by boats alone? Disney. Disney has the fourth largest flotilla in the world.

Stephen Fry: Good God. They'll be making films next!

Alan Davies: How do you spell ribbit? Oh, like that.

Stephen Fry: That’s apparently how you spell it.

Alan Davies: No, that’s rabbit in New Zealand.

Episode A.07 "Arthropods"

Jackie Clune: I have an Australian girlfriend who has two vaginas. She went to have a smear test and the doctor said, "Well, I've got some good news and some bad news. You've got some precancerous cells, but they're only in one of your vaginas." She says, "Oh, I've been saving the other one for that special man."

Stephen Fry: You could call the American Indians, or Native Americans, you could call them Aboriginals if you wanted.

Alan Davies: You could. But it’s more fun to call them redskins.

Stephen Fry: Yes. I wouldn’t try it though, in America.

Alan Davies: No.

Stephen Fry: You’d have your balls turned into a small purse.

Alan Davies: A very big purse, I think you’ll find.

Stephen Fry: What am I thinking?

Alan Davies: I’ll have my balls turned into a rucksack.

Jackie Clune: It is actually possible for the ball sack to be stretched beyond recognition.

Jimmy Carr: By a woman scorned?

Alan Davies: I know that the stingray sucks food up from the sea bed.

Stephen Fry: Yeah, it’s more of a fish than an insect.

Alan Davies: It can locate and suck up food from a foot below the surface of the sea bed.

Stephen Fry: It’s what we in the gay community call a bottom feeder.

Alan Davies: Can I be in the gay community?

Stephen Fry: Oh, very well.

Alan Davies: Can I be an arthropod and in the gay community?

Stephen Fry: It’s a specialist area, but I’m sure there are many websites devoted to it.

Alan Davies: The gay arthropods.

Stephen Fry: The gay arthropods.

Episode A.08 "Albania"

[Randomly, during a question as to whether banana plants are trees]

Sean Lock: They walk.

Stephen Fry: I'm sorry?

Sean Lock: Banana plants, whatever they're called, walk.

Stephen Fry: Nurse, nurse, he's out of bed again.

Sean Lock: ...they do, they walk. I travelled to Colombia and went to a banana plantation and I was admiring this banana tree said "hold on a minute, what about this patch next to the tree and the man said "the banana trees they walk".

[After 15 seconds...]

Stephen Fry: The intelligent voices in my head tell me you're absolutely right Sean, they do walk! They walk up to 40 centimetres in a lifetime.

Stephen Fry: You should read the books.

Alan Davies: I don’t have time to read the books. I haven’t read all yours yet.

Stephen Fry: It’s full of interesting stuff. For instance, Bond has these strange ideas, he has this idea that homosexuals can’t whistle, for example.

Alan Davies: Its cos they’ve got cock in their mouth.

[Stephen drops his head to the desk.]

Stephen Fry: I want you to go and stand in the corner.

Stephen Fry: If a lion mates with a tiger, you get a …?

Alan Davies: Scandal.

Episode A.09 "Africa"

Jo Brand: Can I just say something that's very strange? Because there's some German chewing gum called Spunk, and, um, you do have to be careful you don't swallow it—but in fact, I actually talked about that chewing gum on Clive James's show with you [pointing at Stephen] and Princess Diana! Do you remember? Seriously!

Alan Davies: [wearily] That was a dream. You've got to sort these out.

Stephen Fry: Who are the Lords of Shouting?

Jo Brand and Alan Davies: [hitting their buzzers] WE ARE!

Jeremy Hardy: Thatcher's grave is going to be a permanent urinal to all decent people, isn't it?

Stephen Fry: How do hedgehogs make love?

Alan Davies: Carefully!

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - CAREFULLY]

Stephen Fry: What's long and pink and hard in the morning? Answer - The Financial Times crossword.

Alan Davies: An old lady gave me a Kit Kat recently, and it tasted exactly like old lady’s cupboards. And I looked on the sell by date and it was 1998.

Stephen Fry: Oh, bless.

Dave Gorman: Are you using the phrase ‘old lady’s cupboards’ in any kind of euphemistic sense?

Episode A.10 "Aviation"

[Discussing the airport luggage codes that would cause you to have MAD BAD FAT SAD OLD GIT on your suitcase]

Stephen Fry: … which means they would in fact have recently visited Madrid, which is "MAD" … Bossy-er City, Louisiana …

Rich Hall: Oh!

Stephen Fry: … which is "BAD"—you're from Louisiana, aren't you?

Rich Hall: It's called Bossier City. [He pronounces it "Bojer".]

Stephen Fry: Bossier! I beg its appallingly insignificant pardon.

Peter Serafinowicz: I never saw American History X, because I didn't see any of the first nine.

Stephen Fry: There’s a little bit of Alan in me. Is there any Alan in you?

Rich Hall: No. No.

Alan Davies: Do you want some?

Episode A.11 "Arts"

[Discussing the possibility of receiving xenotransplanted organs from pigs]

Linda Smith: Now what are the chances of a reckless young pig, goes out and gets killed in a motorcycle accident? They probably don't even carry donor cards!

Stephen Fry: It's in the Bible …

Alan Davies: I haven't read it!

Stephen Fry: You should—it's hilarious.

Stephen Fry: What, or which, is the largest living thing on earth?

Alan Davies: [determined] It is the blue whale!

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - BLUE WHALE]

Alan Davies: I had an ants nest in my flat once.

Stephen Fry: Did you? What did you do?

Alan Davies: Well, I was fairly stupid about it, because I saw an ant, I thought ‘there’s an ant in the flat’. And the next day I saw an ant and I thought ‘oh, there he is.’

Stephen Fry: It’s the same one?

Alan Davies: And this went on for a couple of weeks, and then one day I moved the telephone table, there’s loads of them there. They went, [gasps]. Hoovered them. Hoovered the lot of them.

Stephen Fry: No.

Episode A.12: "Advent" (Christmas Special)

Stephen Fry: I'll give you an extra two points if you can tell me the longest fence in the world.

Phill Jupitus: The Great Fence of China!

Alan Davies: It's to keep people off the Great Wall.

Stephen Fry: There's a village in Nuremburg whose name means "eavesdropper" in German. Now, what did this village provide the whole world with for almost 100 consecutive Christmases?

Sean Lock: War criminals.

Stephen Fry: Oh, dear.

Sean Lock: [starts revolving his arm as though roasting on a spit] You know, the old tradition of roasting a war criminal.... With a glass of sherry... "Cheers, Mr Pumblechook!"

Stephen Fry: God in Heaven! Oh, Lord.

Sean Lock: Compliments of the season!

Stephen Fry: Did they...

Sean Lock: [German accent] "I was obeying orders!" [continues roasting on the spit while drinking deeply from a glass of sherry]

[When asked which was the odd one out from London, Paris, Poland and Banana, all places on Christmas Island …]

Stephen Fry: The answer is that none of them are the odd one out.

Phill Jupitus: What kind of hellish quiz is this? "Which one's the odd one out? None of them! Bahahaaa! Bahahaaa! …"

Stephen Fry: Is that meant to be me? [Phill was impersonating Stephen's braying laugh in his role in Blackadder Goes Forth as General Melchett.]

Phill Jupitus: That's you!

Stephen Fry: Oh, bugger you! I don't sound like that—bahahaaa, bahahaaa …

Stephen Fry: Which was the second species of animal for humans to domesticate after the dog?

Alan Davies: A cat.

Stephen Fry: No.

Alan Davies: Prove it!

Series Two [B]

Episode B.01 "Blue"

Stephen Fry: Beetle-fanciers, as you probably know, are called—

Bill Bailey: Coleopterists.

Stephen Fry: Very good! Coleopterists. I'll give you five points for that.

Alan Davies: Press him on how the hell he knows that.

Bill Bailey: Well, when I was a child, I—

Stephen Fry: In Alan's world, knowing something is a kind of freakish, weird thing.

Bill Bailey: Welcome to my world of knowing! The wonderful world of looking up things in books!

Stephen Fry: [discussing rainbows] In Estonia they believe that if you point at a rainbow, your finger will fall off.

Alan Davies: Oh, for God's sake.

Stephen Fry: I know.

Alan Davies: Estonians aren't stupid people, are they?

Stephen Fry: They're not.

Sean Lock: [holding up his fists] They're very stumpy, though.

Alan Davies: She disguised herself as a man to sneak into the king’s chamber.

Stephen Fry: No. She was just very miffed at not being able to marry.

Sean Lock: You sound like you’re in a school play then. “She disguised herself as a man...!” You’re supposed to be an actor!

Stephen Fry: Have you never seen Jonathan Creek?

Episode B.02 "Birds"

Stephen Fry: [about woodpeckers' tongues] How does it fit into its mouth, you may wonder? Well, it has to wrap it round its brain and the back of its eye sockets. Funnily enough, woodpeckers are very popular on creationist websites, because they argue that this is such an extraordinary creature designed so fit for its purpose, and so on, that only a designer could have made it, it couldn't have evolved. Apart from everything else, when it moves, sometimes up to fifteen or sixteen times a second it beats the wood to make a hole, which is incredibly fast and generates immense forces—two hundred and fifty times more forces than an astronaut is subjected to. It's a thousand Gs. And it has these extraordinary kind of little muscles and cartilages around its brain to stop it from shattering. [suddenly laughs] If the pecker's got wood, why go for tongue, you may argue! Um … [giggles as everyone stares at him] … but it is pretty astonishing …

Jo Brand: Could we maybe have an offshoot of this program called Quite Unnecessary? Can I be on that?

Jo Brand: When I was a teenager, someone I knew gave their dog LSD …

Stephen Fry: Oh, my Lord!

Jo Brand: … It went to Glastonbury.

Episode B.03 "Bombs"

Stephen Fry: Phil, one for you, I think. What goes ‘woof, woof, boom’?

Phil Jupitus: Suicidal corgi. The next Norwegian entry for the Eurovision Song Contest? [Singing.] “My heart goes woof, woof, boom.”

Rich Hall: A terrierist!

Alan Davies: Eight hundred Americans die in a McDonald's every year.

Rich Hall: Which one? Best to avoid that one.

Stephen Fry: This brings us neatly to our General Ignorance round, in which we ask Alan, is this a rhetorical question?

Alan Davies: [He thinks for a while.] No.

Stephen Fry: Quite right.

Episode B.04 "Bible"

Stephen Fry: You don't meet many American Jeremys do you? Have you ever met one?

Jeremy Clarkson: No it's too complicated, there's three syllables.

Jeremy Clarkson: I went into a brothel on Saturday.

Stephen Fry: You heard it here first, folks.

Jeremy Clarkson: It's exactly like a motorway service station lavatory.

Alan Davies: Bet that was a welcome break.

Jeremy Clarkson: Every single one of the 247 billion facts on the Internet is wrong.

Episode B.05 "Bears"

Stephen Fry: What has large teeth and only one facial expression?

Bill Bailey: Janet Street-Porter.

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - JANET STREET-PORTER]

[On the word "hello", as opposed to "hullo"]

Stephen Fry: It just meant an expression of surprise—"Hullo, what have we got here?" "Hullo, what's this?" And we still use it in that sense.

Bill Bailey: Do we?

Stephen Fry: … Don't we, Bill?

Bill Bailey: Yes, when we live our lives like 1950s detective films, yes. I often go to my fridge, "Hullo, we're out of milk. I say, mother, where's the milk?"

Stephen Fry: You beast, you beast, you utter, utter, beast.

[Alan holds up his board. It says, ‘sit look rub panda.’]

Stephen Fry: I don’t know, it’s like occupational therapy in an old people’s home. Oh, hello, what have you got here?

Jimmy Carr: [Reading his board.] ‘Put smarties tubes on cats legs make them walk like a robot’.

Stephen Fry: Brilliant. That is absolutely wonderful. He’s used all his letters.

Alan Davies: That is unbe-fucking-lievable. It makes sense. They would walk like a robot. It’s an idea. It’s like giving people an idea.

Bill Bailey: It puts this completely to shame. [He holds his board up. It says, ‘gay elf romp’.]

Alan Davies: I can’t even imagine how you managed to do that!

Stephen Fry: No, I’m sure you can’t, Alan.

Jimmy Carr: It does work, actually. It’s a lovely way to spend an afternoon.

Episode B.06 "Beavers"

Bill Bailey: How many amoebas does it takes to change a lightbulb? One. No, two. No, four. No, eight …

Stephen Fry: They are homophones. They do sound the same … and they hate gay people.

[After Alan incorrectly guesses that Julius Caesar was born by Caesarian section.]

Stephen Fry: We don't know anything particularly extraordinary about his birth, we just wanted, uh, Laughing Boy [gestures to Alan] here to fall into the trap.

Stephen Fry: How many moons does the earth have?

Alan Davies: Two.

Stephen Fry: Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - TWO]

Alan Davies: We did this last series!

Stephen Fry: Yes, but Alan, that was last year. There have been three more discovered.

Alan Davies: Oh, shut up!

Episode B.07 "Biscuits"

Stephen Fry: Do you know what "biscuit" means? What its derivation is? "Bis", meaning…

Alan Davies: Eat, chew, bit …

Stephen Fry: … twice …

Alan Davies: … bite …

Stephen Fry: … twice …

Alan Davies: … bite, sweet, hard, coffee cup.

Stephen Fry: …twice. [laughs] "Sweet, hard, coffee cup"?

Alan Davies: Cup. Coffee cup accompaniment.

Stephen Fry: [To Rich Hall on the American meaning of Biscuit] You have Biscuits and Gravy, don't you? Tell the ladies and gentlemen what that is.

Dara Ó Briain: Oh, Traveller from an arcane land.

Stephen Fry: (As if speaking to a young child) What do your people eat?

Rich Hall: Everything!

Alan Davies: See what happens on this show, Dara, is he (gestures to Stephen) thinks I'm an idiot.

Dara Ó Briain: Yeah, well you think my name is an anagram of diarrhoea, so... I’m really on their side at the moment.

Stephen Fry: Do you know why the grass is greener in Ireland than over here?

Dara O'Briain: Uhm, it's because of lime stone?

Stephen Fry: No, because you're all over here walking on ours.

Stephen Fry: What's the collective noun for a group of baboons?

Rich Hall: The Pentagon.

Arthur Smith: Here's a quite interesting fact: as we know, at the end of a marvellous performance, when we see a live show, and you think it's fabulous and you want more, you shout, "Encore" …

Stephen Fry: Yes …

Arthur Smith: Do you know what the French shout?

Stephen Fry: "Bis"?

Arthur Smith: Oh yeah, you do know.

Episode B.08 "Bees"

Stephen Fry: Honeybees have evolved a complex language to tell each other where the best nectar is, using the sun as a reference point. Amazingly, they can also do this on overcast days and at night by calculating the position of the sun on the other side of the world. This means they can actually learn and store information despite the—

Alan Davies: Has it occurred to you that they may not be using the sun? That whoever has worked that out is wrong? He's now said, "Even if you can't see it or it's on the other side of the world, they still use it." And these bees are thinking, "No, we don't! We just remember where we live!" Why is it so remarkable that they know where they live?

Stephen Fry: … Well, because they have only 950,000 neurons, as opposed to our 10,000,000,000 neurons in our brains.

Alan Davies: But they've only got one thing to remember—where they live.

Alan Davies: Why did the mushroom go to the party?

Jo Brand: No. No.

Stephen Fry: No, not that joke. Why did the mushroom go to the party, Alan?

Alan Davies: Cos he was a fun gi. [The audience groans.] What’s wrong with that joke, then?

Jo Brand: That’s a joke for, like, an imbecile. You know, like nought point seven years old.

Alan Davies: What's brown and sticky?

Jo Brand: Oh, no... I don't kn— yeah, I do...

Alan Davies: A stick.

Jo Brand: Yeah... [Exasperatedly puts her head down.]

Stephen Fry: I'm worried by the audience reaction...

Alan Davies: What do you call a boomerang that won't come back?

Jo Brand: A stick.

Alan Davies: A stick.

Stephen Fry: Do you have any other jokes where the punchline's "a stick"?

Alan Davies: Loads!

Stephen Fry: Oh, right.

Alan Davies: What's orange and sounds like a parrot?... A carrot.

Stephen Fry: What's red and silly?... A blood clot. [The audience groans, Alan grimaces] Oh, don’t look at me like that, you fucking pig-eyed sack of shit! Don't you do that!

Alan Davies: You've spoiled it. What's red and sits in the corner? A naughty strawberry.

Rich Hall: What's green and sings? Elvis Parsley.

[Discussing the potential benefits of time travel, such as witnessing historic moments or seeing yourself at a younger age]

Rich Hall: I had a rolled-up ball of socks. And a hamper all the way across the room. And I just went like that … [imitates a casual throw] … right? Hits the wall, bounces off the ceiling, off this wall, back across that wall, right into the hamper. From, like, forty feet away. I would go back and watch that again.

Episode B.09 "Bats"

Stephen Fry: If I've got a mothball in this hand and a mothball in that hand, what have I got?

Alan Davies: Two mothballs?

Stephen Fry: No, a rather excited moth.

Stephen Fry: In Britain in 1994, you might be interested to know, there were an astonishing range of accidents reported by the, erm … [deep breath] … Trade and Industries Consumer Safety Units Home Accidents Surveillance History Report. Eight people in the UK in '94 were injured by placemats. Thirteen sustained cruet injuries. Five were wounded by dustpans. Eight suffered as a result of a breadbin accident. Five were hurt by sieves. Fourteen fell foul of a serving trolley. Seventeen were treated for injuries caused by a draught excluder. Four hundred and seventy-six people were injured while on the lavatory … there you are. Underwear hurt eleven people.

Alan Davies: How many of those people were drunk?

Stephen Fry: Well, exactly. Or how many of them were sexually experimental?

[discussing the naked chef who won the only race of the first ancient Olympics]

Stephen Fry: He, of course, won by a short head- no... After his final spurt- NO, shut up!

Episode B.10 "Bills"

Stephen Fry: What is bottomry?

Clive Anderson: It's the opposite of topiary.

Stephen Fry: What is the commonest material in the world?

Clive Anderson: Jim Davidson's.

Clive Anderson: Alan, even I can work out that when you know the answer, never give it, cos it’s always the one they’re hoping we’ll say.

Episode B.11 "Beats"

Sean Lock: The huntsman spider is the only spider with lungs.

Alan Davies: So you can get it a birthday cake with a candle on.

[On Larry LaPrise, the inventor of the Hokey Pokey]

Stephen Fry: He died in 1996; what happened at his funeral?

Alan Davies: Oh, it was terrible, they couldn't get him into his coffin.

Stephen Fry: Why was that?

Alan Davies: Well, they put the left leg in … Then the trouble started.

[On the subject of what music do spiders like]

Sean Lock: They've got eight legs; they'd appreciate a one-man band.

[...]

Mark Gatiss: Kylie Minogue

Stephen Fry: Why's that?

Mark Gatiss: Spinning Around

[...]

Sean Lock: But I don't think spiders are that into puns.

Stephen Fry: Well, the answer to this question is, it does seem to be classical music. They did an experiment, er, and they found that ...

Mark Gatiss: Who are "they"? Who are "they"?

Stephen Fry: University of Ohio, in this instance, is "they". Or are "they".

Sean Lock: The University of Fuck-All-Else-Better-To-Do.

Linda Smith: Formerly the Polytechnic of Fuck-All-Else-To-Do.

Episode B.12 "Birth" (Christmas Special)

Alan Davies: I'm not as stupid as you think.

Stephen Fry: No, you're not. You couldn't be.

Alan Davies: What would your super power be of choice?

Stephen Fry: Invisibility.

Alan Davies: Really?

Stephen Fry: Yeah, I think. Ah, it'd be great. What would you like?

Alan Davies: I would like to have no bodily smell.

Rich Hall: I would like to travel ahead in time, but only by two seconds. I could go 'gesundheit', and you [points at Stephen] would sneeze.

Stephen Fry: Scientists have managed to create a big bar, a huge one ton metal bar, which is just a fraction of a degree above zero.

Phil Jupitus: There's bound to be one scientist, that goes in with the big iron bar one day... [looks around, firmly presses tongue against table] ...Ohhh, not again.

[repeatedly, after having switched seats with Stephen]

Alan Davies: ...This question is for Stephen Fry.

Alan Davies: How many states of matter are there?

Stephen Fry: Oh, hello. If you count plasma, I suppose 4: liquids, soli-

Alan Davies: Oop!

[forfeit klaxon goes off - FOUR]

Alan Davies: Four is wrong. Six! I'm surprised at you Stephen.

Alan Davies: Which way does water go down the plug-hole in the Northern Hemisphere?

Stephen Fry: Any way you want it to. You can push to go one way or the other, I've tried it.

[Alan shuffles papers.]

Alan Davies: [sighs disappointedly] … Yes, that's true.

Phil Jupitus: "Stephen, what are you doing in that bathroom?" [as Stephen] "I'm pushing it to go one way, I'm pushing it to go the other, I'm the master … of the bathroom"!

Alan Davies: This one for everyone... What kind of animal is sacred in India?

[short silence]

Stephen Fry: [growled whisper]: DO NOT SAY COW!

[audience laughs]

Stephen Fry: DO NOT SAY COW! That is my hint.

[Phil's buzzer goes off]

Phil Jupitus: Is it the cow?

[forfeit klaxon goes off - COW]

Alan Davies: What do penguins in the Falkland Islands do when RAF jets fly over?

[Stephen buzzes in]

Phil Jupitus: [In University Challenge voice] Fry, Cambridge!

Outtakes

[Talking about Old Testament mythology.]

Alan Davies: Why do people believe all this stuff, Stephen?

Stephen Fry: Well, it’s whether you agree with it or not—

Alan Davies: Never mind televisions ruined Bhutan, this stuff is responsible for some serious aggravation in the world. And people believe it all, for God’s sake! They do believe it all! Bronze age mythology, they believe it all.

Stephen Fry: People believing in manna doesn’t really upset me or anybody sensible as much as, say, than believing—

Alan Davies: I don’t eat meat, right? I don’t eat meat, and someone actually said to me, someone who should remain nameless, really angrily: “Animals were put on earth for us to eat.” What does he mean by that? Put by whom?

Stephen Fry: That’s silly. Off course that’s silly.

Alan Davies: I said: “You can eat one if you want, but don’t shout at me about them being put there like it’s some big toy farmyard.” You are really clever, why do they believe it all? Can’t they just go: “Bwooh, that was mad, I thought that was true for a minute.” Why do people believe it?!

Stephen Fry: Because they are foolish and ignorant and scared.

Alan Davies: They need to believe it? Do they need to believe it?

Stephen Fry: There is a distinction to be drawn between those who claim to have access to revealed truth and therefore claim to know what happens to us after we’re dead on the basis of a text, whether it’s a Quran or a Holy Bible.

Alan Davies: But why do people believe them?

Stephen Fry: Which is nonsensical. And if they want to believe it, they’re fine, but they mustn’t push it down our throats and they mustn’t tell me whom I’m allowed to go to bed with and whom I’m not allowed to go to bed with. It’s not acceptable. Anybody who tells me what happens after I’m dead is either a liar or a fool, because they don’t know.

Alan Davies: That is what I mean! I don’t mind—

Stephen Fry: The myth of the Jewish people having manna dropped on their heads, that doesn’t actually matter. That’s no more different — that’s like Greek myth or any other myth, that’s fine. It’s when it gets to telling people how to behave is where we do draw the line.

Series Three [C]

Episode C.01 "Campanology"

Rob Brydon: There a map, which I think MI5 had, that shows not just Hadrian's Wall, but Hadrian's Conservatory and Hadrian's water feature, which is very nice, it sort of cascades down over pebbles.

Stephen Fry: Yes, Carlisle is in a sense Hadrian's sliding patio door, isn't it?

[on the Ordnance Survey map]

Stephen Fry: Well, each town is 30,000 pounds, and...

Rob Brydon: For Port Talbot? They're not gonna charge 30,000 pounds for Port Talbot, Stephen. They're not gonna get that.

Stephen Fry: Port Talbot, is that on the south Welsh coast, by any chance?

Rob Brydon: Yes. No, you'd be lucky to get 15 quid for that.

Stephen Fry: Well, Port Talbot may be less than 30,000 pounds, but it's like that old joke isn't it? About the atomic bomb going off in Cardiff, and causing seven pounds worth of damage.

Alan Davies: Did you know all the rats in England all face the same direction at any given time?

Stephen Fry: Oh, come on.

Bill Bailey: No, that's right. Because they're magnetic, aren't they, rats?

Alan Davies: They spent so long in lead lined sewage pipes, that they move with the curvature of the earth.

Bill Bailey: Hence the phrase "there's rat, and true rat. And absolute rat."

Rob Brydon: Is this a reference to the joke about "What is a sheep tied to a lamp post in Cardiff"? It's a leisure center.

Rich Hall: For five million pounds, I'd want a map that showed me looking at the map I'd just bought.

Stephen Fry: I remember the first time I heard my father say the word fuck, my brother and I couldn't believe it. Because we thought we made the word up.

Rich Hall: The first time I said the word fuck, my dad heard me. Walked by my bedroom door and I said "Dad shut the door, I'm trying to fuck in here."

[On the Isle of Wight being the last place in Britain to be Christianized]

Stephen Fry: It was in 686 AD, almost a century after the rest of the country. Subjugated by Cædwalla who was king of the West Saxons and who had killed most of the Pagan population to Christianize it. Good ol' Christianity.

[on non-newtonian fluids]

Stephen Fry: ...the harder and firmer it becomes. You could slowly [gestures with protruding finger] put your finger through it...

Rich Hall: Oh boy. Here we go.

Stephen Fry: The finger slips in smoothly...

Rich Hall: Wow.

Stephen Fry: It's... No. [embarrassed] Please, help me out here. But if you slap it hard... [realises, double facepalms] Oh, dear.

Alan Davies: Are all the stars round?

Stephen Fry: I can't answer that. Um, I think probably most-

Alan Davies: Yet you know what people thought five hundred years ago?

Stephen Fry: Do I read books? Yes. Have I visited every star in the universe? No. Is this something you find difficult to understand? [A few moments of silence pass.] You've set me off.

Stephen Fry: What is a taffy pull?

Rob Brydon: Is this another dig at my forefathers?

Stephen Fry: You've got four fathers? The Welsh are weird.

Episode C.02 "Cummingtonite"

Stephen Fry: Who, or what, is Cummingtonite?

Alan Davies: [Giggles] I don’t know. The night is young, Stephen.

Arthur Smith: It’s marvellous to be six because you’re not aware of your own mortality. You think you’re the centre of the universe... Days last a hundred years! It’s always summer! You can put your head in some custard and no one cares.

Doon Mackichan: I'd quite like to be, sort of … a minute … old. After the smack and everything's washed off, you're straight on the tit, you've got entertainment, you've got sleep and you can cry all the time without anyone thinking you're weird.

[Guessing the contents of the Queen's handbag]

Doon Mackichan: The Little Book of Calm … and mace spray.

Episode C.03 "Common Knowledge"

Jimmy Carr: I'll tell you what though, the only indigineous mammals in Australasia are marsupials.

Stephen Fry: They're therefore not mammals.

[The audience laughs and Jimmy looks stunned.]

Sean Lock: Did you not know that they're cats! Hahahaha, Hahahaha, they're cats! All of them!

Jimmy Carr: I'm sorry for trying to be clever. Sorry, back to the knob gags.

Alan Davies: What's your favourite bit of the koala. Do you like the hands, the little hands?

Jimmy Carr: I like the cock.

Stephen Fry: Oh stop.

Jimmy Carr: Told ya.

[Rory has been displaying his knowledge of the periodic table.]

Rory McGrath: Selenium is 34, arsenic is 33.

Stephen Fry: Very good. Isn't he good? They should really put railings around you and have children come and stare at you.

[Rory has been getting several answers correct by now.]

Jimmy Carr: Now, this is a team game, isn't it? I'm on his team, is that right?

[Rory puts his hand on Jimmy's shoulder whilst everyone laughs]

Jimmy Carr: This is my team mate here. We're killin' them, aye? [He swears using his hand at Sean and Alan]. Come on! You want some?

Sean Lock: Yes, but, later on, when we go out, people will talk to us.

Stephen Fry: (sing-song, about 10 Downing Street) There's always someone in there!

Jimmy Carr: Well why did you sing that?! It was a little bit scary! There's always someone in there!

Stephen Fry: I wanted to frighten you.

Jimmy Carr: I am frightened. I think someone might be under the desk!

[About Mr. Chicken, the last private resident of 10 Downing Street]

Stephen Fry: Sadly, nothing else is known of Mr. Chicken.

Jimmy Carr: He was a philatelist, and he worked in a bank. And he used to sail. So there's three facts, so I should get some points for those. Little-known facts, but true.

Rory McGrath: I think he also played the tenor banjo.

Sean Lock: He had eleven knuckles!

Alan Davies: And, in fact, was actually a chicken.

Stephen Fry: [exasperated] So, the most biographed man in the 18th century...

Alan Davies: Something’s 98% water, I know it is.

Jimmy Carr: Is it the sea?

Stephen Fry: Do you remember anything he said?

Sean Lock: No, not a word. He said something about calcium, there’s a tree with a funny name, I don’t know. Koalas invented rice. Um, other stuff. He’s like a robot!

Episode C.04 "Cheating"

Stephen Fry: So tonight we have three astronauts, and one astro-minus-25. Ha, the things I do with words.

[ Jeremy Clarkson holds up a sign saying "I like Stephen".]

Stephen Fry: It's like having your own little performing donkeys.

Stephen Fry: In 1900 there was a sport where Britain won a gold medal, in which the only other country that competed was France. Can you imagine what that might have been?

John Sessions: Arrogance?

Stephen Fry: What’s quite interesting about the sperm of fruit flies?

Alexander Armstrong: It smells of guava.

Episode C.05 "Cat's Eyes"

Stephen Fry: What do you get when you cross a camel with a leopard?

Jo Brand: You get a fireside rug you can have a good hump on.

Sean Lock: You get sacked from the zoo?

[On how the ancient armies caught elephants]

Rich Hall: Well, the truth of the matter is many of these elephants volunteered. They came from small towns, there was no future, no … no circus coming through town …

Episode C.06 "Cockneys"

Stephen Fry: Now, tonight any flamencos you give in Pyong score barney. And I’ll also give you two Sundays...

Alan Davies: What the fuck are you talking about?!

Stephen Fry: So, the question is, how does the U.S. government look after its sequoia groves?

Bill Bailey: Er … lions … and tigers are let loose to roam the surrounding areas …

Alan Davies: Do they try to win the hearts and minds of the sequoia?

Stephen Fry: Why shouldn't I strip Alan naked and cover him in gold paint?

Phill Jupitus: You win your Oscar properly like everyone else!

Episode C.07 "Constellations"

Sean Lock: I got the worst Christmas present ever, ever in my life. My sister gave me a "Grow Your Own Luffa" kit.

Stephen Fry: God bless her!

Sean Lock: It was a clay pot, a bag of earth and five seeds. And I think the clay pot hit her hardest.

[discussing the luffa]

Sean Lock: If you're a nun...

Stephen Fry: [appalled] Oh no, don't go there.

Sean Lock: [grinning] I didn't say anything!

Stephen Fry: Oh please.

Sean Lock: It's obviously a reason that in Victorian bathrooms they had articles like that, it's a huge excuse for sexual jollities, isn't it? [gestures] "Oh no, I use it for my back!" It would feel like, you know, like sometimes if you sit on your hand, and it feels like someone else is doing it, it would feel like someone with a stump is playing with it. [makes provocative wagging gesture]

Stephen Fry: Mummy, make the nasty man go away... Very odd.

[Alan makes bashing gestures with luffa]

Stephen Fry: No! Give me that luffa.

Alan Davies: Now you want it.

Stephen Fry: That's going in the art cupboard and you're going in the naughty corner if you're not careful.

Rich Hall: It's going in your penis tin isn't it?

Stephen Fry: You are very bad children indeed.

Stephen Fry: What colour was the Model T Ford?

Jeremy Clarkson: [Whispering to Alan] Don't say, don't say, don't say...

Alan Davies: Black?

Jeremy Clarkson: Oh.

[forfeit klaxon goes off - BLACK]

Stephen Fry: Oh bless him, like a little puppy that runs into a wall.

Alan Davies: You can have any colour, so long as it's black.

Stephen Fry: Oh, he said that even. Even that phrase.

[forfeit klaxon goes off - ANY COLOR AS LONG AS IT'S BLACK]

Jeremy Clarkson: Did you know a veal has to have more space to be transported to the abattoir than a human being in the back of an aeroplane.

Sean Lock: ...yeah, but to be fair, we have a holiday, they get killed.

Jeremy Clarkson: I had a puffin last week, that's not delicious, but the point of eating it was because I never had one before...

Sean Lock: ...have you tried one of my turds?

Stephen Fry: Did you just say what I thought you said? Get out. Out now.

Jeremy Clarkson: D'you know what I had for my starter when I had the whale?

Stephen Fry: With grated puffin?

Jeremy Clarkson: I had a seal flipper, and it looked exactly like a marigold glove filled with wallpaper paste. And it sat and you thought, "Ooh …!" And it tasted exactly like licking a hot Turkish urinal.

Sean Lock: I'm very concerned that you used the word "exactly"...

[looking at the aries star sign]

Stephen Fry: Ah, there we are. It's some sort of goat. It's a goat waiting to be fucked from behind.

Sean Lock: It's a provocative goat.

Stephen Fry: Quite clearly a Greek goat.

Alan Davies: If you ask a lady for directions, she’ll ask you a question back. So if you say “do you know where the post office is?”, she’ll say, “do you wanna buy a stamp?”

Stephen Fry: Sweet.

Alan Davies: And you’ll find you’re having a nice chat, and everyone’s friends, but you’ve no idea where the post office is.

Episode C.08 "Corby"

Stephen Fry: The Chinese also invented the loo roll. Name 3 other Chinese inventions

Alan Davies: Pot Noodles

Bill Bailey: Whispers

[On fortune cookies]

Phill Jupitus: I wish they'd be a bit more honest—I mean, snap, "With the amount of MSG you've just had, a massive coronary is on the way"!

[After Alan has related a tale of him being a member of the pub quiz team]

Phill Jupitus: Wouldn't it be great if you walked into a pub with him, though … [points at Stephen] … with Fry on your team? "Yeah, this is Barry from down the road. Yeah, he does look like him." And Fry would be there having to fake it in the pub—"Oh, blimey!"

Bill Bailey: Giving it away by swearing in Latin!

[There's a picture of a statue on the screen.]

Stephen Fry: Who is this?

Alan Davies: Eros.

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - EROS]

Stephen Fry: Well, thank you for falling into our little heffalump trap there. It’s actually the Angel of Christian Charity.

Alan Davies: Eros.

Stephen Fry: Eros was the Greek god of love. This is the Angel of Christian Charity.

Alan Davies: Why is it called Eros, then?

Episode C.09 "Creatures"

Bill Bailey: I saw a goat up a tree in Morocco. They go right up the top! I couldn't believe it, I thought it was somebody in the pub having me on, but no …

Stephen Fry: And you're sure it was a tree, not a goathanger?

Stephen Fry: What does a pair of pygmy chimpanzees do when they see a box?

Helen Atkinson-Wood: Wear children's clothes and have a tea party.

Stephen Fry: An octopus the size of a volleyball can fit into a soft drink can.

Bill Bailey: Er, bluff.

Stephen Fry: After a lifetime working with radioactivity, what did Marie Curie have two of?

Alan Davies: Lesbians.

Stephen Fry: She had two lesbians? She left them in her will to someone.

Stephen Fry: What is the Italian for cuttlefish? Do you know by any chance??

Alan Davies: Cuttlefishio?

Episode C.10 "Cleve Crudgington"

[after a question barrage from Alan]

Stephen Fry: I'm looking at my information card here because you're really pumping me, Alan. You're pumping me.

[On opening champagne bottles the correct way]

John Sessions: I was always taught to do that. You actually twist it …

Stephen Fry: Yeah, twist, exactly. That's it.

Mark Steel: Where do you get taught these things?

Stephen Fry: Well, where did you go to school, Mark Steel?

Mark Steel: I went to Swanley Comprehensive, and that was every Tuesday morning we did Double Champagne Opening!

Stephen Fry: This was at a party given by their graces the Duke and Duchess of Westminster—

[Whistles go off and the words "Luvvie Alarm" flash on the screen.]

Stephen Fry: Oh, no! Come on! No! No! Fair dos! No!

Clive Anderson: The richest man in the country apart from Roman Abramovich.

Stephen Fry: I never penetrated his intimate circle, but …

Stephen Fry: Anyway, Celtic nations but especially Caledonia are rightly praised for their creativity, so name three Scottish inventions.

Clive Anderson: Oh, and you're gonna say they weren't invented in Scotland, are you?

Stephen Fry: I don't know, depends on what you say.

Clive Anderson: Well, the television is always the one that's sort of claimed...

[forfeit klaxon goes off - TELEVISION]

Stephen Fry: [After revealing that neither Television, Haggis nor Whiskey was invented in Scotland] Scottish inventions and discoveries include: Adhesive stamps, the Australian national anthem, the Bank of England, bicycle pedals, the breech-loading rifle--you'll notice I'm going in alphabetical order--Bovril, the cell nucleus, chloroform, the cloud chamber, cornflower, a cure for malaria, the decimal point, the Encyclopedia Britannica, fountain pens, fingerprinting, hypnosis, hypodermic syringes, insulin, the kaleidoscope, the lawnmower, lime cordial, logarithms, lorries, marmalade, matches, motor insurance, paraffin, piano pedals, the postmark, pneumatic tyres, RADAR, the reflecting telescope, savings banks, the screw propeller, the speedometer, the steam hammer, raincoats, tarmac, teleprinters, tubular steel, typhoid vaccine, ultrasound scanners, the United States Navy, Universal Standard Time, vacuum flasks, wave-powered electricity generations, and wire rope!

Alan Davies: Why is pussy another word for front bottom?

Stephen Fry: I don't know, it's not my area of expertise.

Stephen Fry: Anyway, back to Cleve Crudgington and his corks.

Alan Davies: Did he insert them into his person?

Stephen Fry: You will never know how thin the ice upon which you just skated was, there. We had a little forfeit all ready for you.

[Without the klaxon noise, the forfeit flashes on the screen - RAMS THEM UP HIS ARSE]

Stephen Fry: Oh, there it is. We know that’s what you were thinking.

Stephen Fry: I leave you with this cautionary snippet about paying attention. A radio interviewer from GLR radio carried away with news of a possible discovery of a cross between an elephant and a woolly mammoth, asked a palaeontologist "so it'd be like some sort of hairy gorilla, would it?" To which the palaeontologist replied "Yes, pretty much! Except elephant shaped. And eh, with tusks."

Episode C.11 "Carnival"

[On treating phobias]

Phill Jupitus: So I'll have to get into a bath full of spiders?

Jo Brand: You can do it two ways. You can do a graded desensitization, where you're gradually exposed to spiders, or you can do something called flooding, where you just get chucked in with them.

Stephen Fry: This is cognitive therapy, isn't it?

Jo Brand: Well, it's more sort of behavioural therapy really, because it's cheap.

Phill Jupitus: I think I'll settle with just screaming like a girl and running around the house, if that's alright with you.

[On the subject of cockfighting]

Stephen Fry: [reading from a card] It says here a good cocker would think nothing of cleaning his cock's wounded head by sticking it in his mouth and sucking it clean.

[The audience laughs and Clive murmurs in agreement.]

Phill Jupitus: You're watching QI for the Straight Guy!

[On the original story of Cinderella]

Stephen Fry: The original stories were quite gruesome. When the ugly sisters tried to slip into the slipper, they cut off their toes and their bunions to try and squeeze in, and the slippers filled with blood.

Jo Brand: They probably got that idea from Trinny and Susannah.

Episode C.12 "Combustion"

Stephen Fry: What I want you to do first is tell me all about the twelve Frenchmen and the twelve mosquitoes.

Dara Ó Briain: Once upon a time, there were twelve Frenchmen called... 'Appy, Sleepy, Arrogant, Furieux, Un Chose Comme Ca, Bof and Zut Alors. And...

Phill Jupitus: That's six!

Dara Ó Briain: Fenètre, Boulangerie...

Alan Davies: Le Table.

Dara Ó Briain: Le Table, of course. And Jambon et Fromage, the twins. And they used to travel around with mosquitoes...

Phill Jupitus: And what were the mosquitoes called?

Bill Bailey: Buzzy, Stingy...

Dara Ó Briain: It was a very, very low-rent 1950's French detective series, that involved, at some point, the extraction of a tiny amount of blood from one of the suspects.

Stephen Fry: When the Titanic sank, what was the first thing that happened to the crew?

Phill Jupitus: Terrible luck for them, but they actually had their six-month review...

[On what happened to the crew of the RMS Titanic]

Stephen Fry: Every single member of the crew had their wages stopped at the moment of the sinking. The moment a ship sinks, it is not a ship, therefore you can't work on it, therefore the White Star Line paid them up to the minute of the sinking.

Phill Jupitus: I would imagine that in a sinking situation, you'd hope to be getting time and a half.

[On the Titanic]

Phill Jupitus: Is it true that someone dressed as a lady to escape detection?

Stephen Fry: Yes, apparently it is true, because it was women and children first.

Bill Bailey: [chuckling] I thought you said "someone dressed as a baby".

Phill Jupitus: [posh accent] "Yes, goo-goo indeed. I have a lollipop and I have no control over my urinary functions. I am, in fact, an infant. And I know you think I'm Lord Albemarle, but I am in fact a little baby. With a beard. Yes, goo-goo, gaa-gaa. And madam, may I tell you I've been a very naughty baby?"

Stephen Fry: How do you tell able seamen from ordinary seamen? [Laughter] When you applied for a job on a merchant vessel, you registered either as an able seamen or an ordinary seamen, and they accepted your word. But you kept a log of your work, which was the real proof and it was called a Certificate of Continuous Discharge.

[On the novel The DaVinci Code]

Stephen Fry: ... and I use the word books very loosely, like... The DaVinci Code. (spits) It is complete loose stool water. It is arse-gravy of the worst kind.

Alan Davies: He was a blues singer... "Please welcome Lou Stool Water!"

[Bill Bailey presses his steel guitar buzzer]

Series Four [D]

Episode D.01: "Danger"

Stephen Fry: One in thirty million people risk dying by being murdered, the risk of choking to death is one in a hundred and twenty million, the risk of dying by tea cosy is one in twenty billion. There is, however, a one in two hundred and fifty seven thousand chance of you dying today during this programme.

Jimmy Carr: … What have you got planned for Round Two?

Stephen Fry: What is three times more dangerous than war?

Jimmy Carr: ...three wars?

Stephen Fry: You are three times more likely to die at work than at war.

Alan Davies: Does that include soldiers?

Stephen Fry: There was a story during the Terror of the French Revolution, that two members of the National Assembly were guillotined and their heads put in the same bag straight away, and one bit the other so hard they couldn't be separated. Just the heads.

Jimmy Carr: That's holding a grudge, isn't it? For all intents and purposes, you're dead, let it go! Yeah, you didn't get on, whatever!

Stephen Fry: They were French.

[on the Darwin Awards]

Jimmy Carr: It's the reason they should allow people to walk down the railway tracks if they so wish. If they can't work out a train's coming... [shrugs]

Stephen Fry: Right.

Jimmy Carr: Let's face it, the gene pool needs a little chlorine. [points around audience] You know who you are.

Stephen Fry: Another dangerous sport is russian roulette of course.

Alan Davies: That's dangerous. In the early days, you had a musket. You'd only have the one.

Episode D.02: "Discoveries"

Arthur Smith: D'you know what you should drink with the beating heart of a cobra? This is a dish in China where you get a cobra—and it's brought to the table alive. They then slice it open, rip the heart out, and it's beating on the plate there—you have to chase it round the plate, I s'pose—and then you drink the blood of the snake as the wine.

Clive Anderson: Actually, I ordered the lasagne …

Arthur Smith: I had occasion to hire a theatrical duck, once …

Clive Anderson: A luvvie duck!

Vic Reeves: In my career, I've had occasion to hire many, many an animal, but the most expensive was a pelican.

Stephen Fry: Was it an enormous bill?

Stephen Fry: Name something quite interesting that kangaroos can’t do.

Alan Davies: They can’t drive.

Episode D.03: "Dogs"

Stephen Fry: ....good evening and welcome to QI, for another tentative sniff at the enormous bottom of knowledge.

[on the differences between cats and dogs]

Liza Tarbuck: Cats mating, it can be a quite exclusive little gang, whereas dogs, they can run riots, so you could have a Great Dane with a Chihuahua.

Stephen Fry: It's a nice image.

Alan Davies: It would involve a stepladder. Or a ditch.

Stephen Fry: What's the most interesting thing a dog can smell?

Neil Mullarkey: [presses buzzer] A dog's dinner?

Stephen Fry: Yes. To a dog that is the most interesting thing a dog can smell.

Alan Davies: Other than that, another dog's bottom.

Stephen Fry: Yeah. Oh.

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - BOTTOMS]

Stephen Fry: Oh, there you are. Oh, no.

Jeremy Clarkson: My crotch. [laughter] Well, they all do.

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - BOLLOCKS]

Stephen Fry: Can you blame them? They're only flesh and blood...

Stephen Fry: What comes before a German Bight?

Neil Mullarkey: [presses buzzer] A German Bark.

Stephen Fry: Yeah, ho.

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - GERMAN BARK]

Stephen Fry: You were thinking of J.S., possibly.

Alan Davies: No, they never bark when they're going to attack you. It's when they go quiet, that's when you have to worry.

Stephen Fry: Germans?

[On the Silbo Gomero whistling language]

Stephen Fry: Do you know how they communicate across valleys?

Alan Davies: Shout.

Neil Mullarkey: Mobile phone.

Stephen Fry: [grinning] No... Not... It's a language they use, but instead of their vocal cords, they...

Alan Davies: Fart?

Jeremy Clarkson: It was my favourite VC winner was a first World War fighter pilot. His name was Ferdinand West, I think. And they were attacked by 7 German planes. In the first, sort of, wave he had his leg shot off - completely off. So he, it was jamming the controls: he took it out and threw it out of the plane, manoeuvred his plane so they could get off some good bursts into the Germans, drove them away, dropped his bombs, landed back at base, apologised for the poor quality of his landing, and then sought medical attention.

Stephen Fry: My great-uncle had his tongue shot off in the war. He never talked about it.

Stephen Fry: You know that joke, don't you? What's the similarity is between the pelican and British Gas? They can both can stick their bills up their arses.

Episode D.04: "Dictionaries"

Stephen Fry: Name, if you can, the subject of the three volume book whose first volume is entitled "The Long Years of Obscurity."

Phill Jupitus: The career of Phil Collins.

Ronni Ancona: Is this book about the word obscurity before it got famous? How it was beaten by its adjective father. And left on the doorstep abandoned by its mother, and it was the only noun growing up in a house of verbs. And the verbs were always going out doing lovely things, because they were doing words, and poor old obscurity was stuck inside suffering from asthma. And then after school it was surrounded by quotation marks and got beaten up terribly. And then one day entered into reality TV show and it became very famous and it was much in demand and used to describe all the people who leave Big Brother House?

Rory Bremner: They built the station next to the power station you see there, which is the third worst eyesore in the country. It was a Country Life thing—do you know what the first one was?

Phill Jupitus: [in a posh accent] People! Public people! Working classes! Poorly groomed servants! The ill-bred ponies! That Blair fellow!

Stephen Fry: If I find out you've been intercepting my mail …

[Discussing dolphins]

Ronni Ancona: A lot of people say that they're smarter than people, but if they were, wouldn't they be saying that?

Ronni Ancona: It's so weird that these national heroes are not from the place they are supposed to be. William Wallace was from Kenya. His mother was Masai... Not really!

Stephen Fry: So, Culloden was really more of a local difficulty; it was Highland versus Lowland; it was like Celtic and Rangers. Catholic versus Protestant, essentially. It's that kind of fight. And it goes on to this day. Will we never learn? Who knows? Religion. Shit it.

Episode D.05: "Death" (Hallowe'en Special)

[Speaking of marmots]

Stephen Fry: Given the right conditions, it's a dangerous, a deadly merciless killer of humans. How?

Clive Anderson: [presses his buzzer]

Stephen Fry: Clive.

Clive Anderson: Lead piping in the billiard room.

[Guessing which illness most doctors treat more than any other]

Alan Davies: Pregnancy?

Clive Anderson: Pregnancy isn't a disease, Alan.

Andy Parsons: It would be if Alan got it!

Clive Anderson: It’d be a surprise, wouldn’t it?

Stephen Fry: I’ll give you a clue. It begins with D.

Alan Davies: Death?

Stephen Fry: Doctors don’t treat death.

Episode D.06: "Drinking"

Stephen Fry: Oh, there you are. Great Wall of China.

Jimmy Carr: I've got quite an interesting fact about that.

Stephen Fry: Yep.

Jimmy Carr: Longest wall in the world, not one cashpoint.

[After discussing the Great Stink]

Phill Jupitus: I'd love to have been in parliament that day. "And I put it to the honourable member, that he who smelt it, dealt it!"

Stephen Fry: Whoa!

[Forfeit Klaxon goes off - HE WHO SMELT IT DEALT IT.]

[After Stephen has had to have beer goggles explained to him]

Phill Jupitus: Stephen doesn't have beer goggles, he has Madeira pince-nez. "Oh, you're a cracker! More Madeira? A small Sherry?"

Alan Davies: A Sherry Monocle? He's got the Sherry Monocle in.

Stephen Fry: You're all rotters and I hate you.

Episode D.07: "Differences"

Jo Brand: In fact, every woman in the world has got bird flu. But we don't give a shit, we just get on with our lives. Now it's only because a few men have caught it lately that people are going mad about it. "Oh, I've got bubonic plague, but I've still got to do the hoovering."

[About alcohol]

Alan Davies: Does it affect memory? Cos I’m fairly sure it does.

Stephen Fry: I did know that.

Alan Davies: Cos on my 30th birthday, I got some photos back after we had this dinner, and there were people with indoor sparklers. And I thought, “when did they have them? I must have gone to the loo or something. I don’t remember that.” And the next one was me with a sparkler. Then it’s me with two sparklers. Me lighting sparklers really intently, handing sparklers out.

[on breaking wind in front of the queen]

Julian Clary: It was just a little smidge as I thought, and I tried to get rid of it by internal squeezing. But it can't be done, and...

Stephen Fry: ...are the muscles a little lax down there?

Stephen Fry: What's the difference between table tennis and ping pong?

Jo Brand: In table tennis you serve the ball with a bat, and in ping pong it's launched from the vagina of a Thai woman.

[Stephen asks for Gandhi's first name, which is not 'Mahatma'.]

Stephen Fry: Do you know what "Mahatma" means?

Alan Davies: It means "Can I have my hat please, Mother?"

Episode D.08: "Descendants" (Children in Need Special)

Jonathan Ross: What's the protocol for when you see a really ugly baby?

Rich Hall: I'll tell you. People show you their babies on their phone now, and it's like a cashew with some hair coming out of it. The thing to say is "Nice phone".

[Discussing what babies have that adults do not]

Stephen Fry: They don't have kneecaps, do they?

Jonathan Ross: Aren't you confusing them with mer-babies?

[A picture of the KKK comes up]

Rich Hall: Oh man, of all the pictures you have to show.

Stephen Fry: I know, it's not good.

Rich Hall: That's my uncle in that.

[After not speaking for ages, Rich hits his buzzer.]

Stephen Fry: Er, Rich?

Rich Hall: Ever since the clangers, I’ve been lost. The last picture I recognised was the KKK and that’s pretty sad.

Episode D.09: "Doves"

Stephen Fry: Thirty-mile-an-hour winds come when a train enters the station, and a lot of hair gets blown down into the tunnels.

Andy Hamilton: That's how I lost mine, actually. Most of it is Tottenham Court Road.

[Talking about how Tube tunnels are cleaned]

Alan Davies: I don't understand why you can't have a—you know, like you used to have a cleaning tape for your cassette deck—you can't have a cleaning Tube? You'd just send a big furry train down …

Episode D.10: "Divination"

[About Derren Brown]

Johnny Vaughan: He's got one great trick. You know when you've got an empty seat by you in a train, and you don't want anybody to sit there? He says you're insane to put things on the chair to stop people sitting there. The trick is, as they approach, you smile at them and pat the seat.

Stephen Fry: The word "donkey"—when did it come into the English language?

Graeme Garden: When was Don Quixote published?

[On the Number of the Beast ]

Stephen Fry: They've discovered a papyrus which has the whole book of Revelations--it's the oldest papyrus on the book of Revelations--and the number is 616, as was known about--

Graeme Garden: [pressing his buzzer] That's the fax number of the Beast.

Episode D.11: "Deprivation"

Mark Steel: You know what they say is a test of whether you're anal? Whether or not you keep your records in alphabetical order. I would surely think that it depends on how many records you got—I mean, if you've only got two and you keep going back and going "ABBA, ZZ Top, they're still there, that's lovely" but I've got a roomful of bloody records! I keep them in alphabetical order so I can find the one I want! Apparently that means I got a problem with me arse! How is that right?

Stephen Fry: What is meant by the expression "hoover the talking seal"?

Roger McGough: Well, it's either one of those wonderful Oz expressions for throwing up … "Excuse me, I've got to go hoover the talking seal …"

Stephen Fry: Or "My wife came in just as I was hoovering the talking seal …"

Roger McGough: [reciting a poem] A crab, I'm told, will not bite,
Or poison you just for spite;
Won't lie in wait beneath a stone,
Until one morning out alone,
You poke a finger like a fool
Into an innocent-looking pool;
Won't grab your hand
And drag you off across the sand
Down into the bottom of the sea
To eat you dressed for Sunday tea.
The crab, I'm told, is a bundle of fun.
With claws like that? Pull the other one!

Episode D.12: "Domesticity"

Stephen Fry: Jo, what’s a good way to create the impression that you’ve cleaned the house when you haven’t?

Jo Brand: Just lock the door and kill everyone.

[Stephen answering the question on how to create the impression that you've cleaned the house when you haven't.]

Stephen Fry: You spray or apply furniture polish to a radiator, and it fills the room with the smell of furniture polish. These hints are either from a book called Trade Secrets by Katherine Lapworth and Alexandra Fraser, or from Superhints by the Lady...

Jo Brand: I know those two. They're slags, the pair of them.

Stephen Fry: What do you know of the book called Superhints by the Lady Wardington?

Jo Brand: Yeah, I know her.

Stephen Fry: Do you know the Lady Wardington?

Jo Brand: She's a bitch.

Stephen Fry: What is the cheapest way to remove blood stains from clothes? Let’s imagine if you cut yourself shaving and you get a spot there.

Alan Davies: The cheapest way?

Stephen Fry: Yeah.

Alan Davies: What, you have to go down to the river and beat it on a rock?

[Stephen has said that you get a better clean on a knife blade if you have it pointing up in the cutlery rack of a dishwasher.]

Phill Jupitus: I clean my knives in a crossbow. Some people say it's foolish. I put them in the hoover and set it on blow, and then shoot them and trap them around the kitchen, as I sit with a plug, bare-wired, at my feet, peeing on it! Gives it a better clean...

[A picture of a blood-spattered surgeon appears on the screen.]

Jo Brand: Can I just say, I'm so impressed you got a picture of my husband in our fantasy sex kit.

[on having to replace a door]

Alan Davies: The door handle kept turning like that. Turning and turning and turning, and I couldn’t get into the loo. And I really needed to go. So I kicked the door in. And it’s the only time I’ve ever kicked a door in. Brilliant! It was a really cheap, flimsy door, and it smashed, like that, and it exploded, and the door bit fell down, and there was wood everywhere, and I burst in, and [smiling triumphantly] had a crap.

Stephen Fry: Lovely. Very nice.

Episode D.13: "December" (Christmas Special)

Stephen Fry: Mithras was a saviour sent to Earth to live as a mortal, through whom it was possible for sinners to be reborn into immortal life; he died for our sins but came back to life the following Sunday; he was born of a virgin on December 25th in a manger or, perhaps, a cave, attended by shepherds, and became known as The Light of the World; he had twelve disciples with whom he shared a last meal before dying; his devotees symbolically consumed the flesh and blood of him. Because Mithras was a sun god he was worshipped on Sundays...

Alan Davies: Is he a tribute band?

Stephen Fry: There are dozens of religions in world mythology that have visits by wise men, kings who killed children to stop the new king from being born. There's a great deal in Christianity that's traditional. And however wonderful people think the story is, it's frankly not original.

Dara Ó Briain: That is an interesting direction to start a Christmas Special with.

Rich Hall: The nativity story in the bible, probably could find a hotel room because they hadn't booked in advance.

Alan Davies: They should known it will be busy. Because its Christmas.

Rich Hall: Every day is a Bank Holiday in America.

Dara Ó Briain: [explaining how to pour Guinness correctly] Five-twelfths of an inch is the ideal head around the top, and if somebody paints a shamrock into it, you're allowed to stab them in the eye with a fork.

Dara Ó Briain: [in thick Irish accent] And they stuck All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day around the time people were celebrating …

Stephen Fry: You know, I don't think there is an Arseholes Day.

Dara Ó Briain: You and your liberal agenda.

Stephen Fry: Why do they [British Royal Family] open presents on Christmas Eve?

Jo Brand: Because they're all fuckin' mad!

Stephen Fry: No, because they're all fuckin' German!

Dara Ó Briain: I do remember once going out with a lady who was raised atheist, and an utter chore to walk around the gallery with. They go, 'who's the guy on the sticks? Is he the same guy who was in the shed earlier on?'

Stephen Fry: Name a saint who comes from Ireland.

Alan Davies: Patrick.

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - PATRICK]

Alan Davies: Why do I even bother?

Series Five [E]

Episode E.01: "Engineering"

Stephen Fry: Where is the best place to be when a nuclear bomb goes off?

Jimmy Carr: I would've gone with downtown Nagasaki. Because what are the chances of that happening again? You've got to play the odds.

Stephen Fry: What could you make with an ultrasound rectal probe, a light-emitting tube, bicycle helmets, protective clothing, a huge tub of Vaseline, and a wheel-barrow?

Jimmy Carr: I could make you the happiest man alive.

Stephen Fry: How does a love bomb work?

Rob Brydon: I turn up and I get on with it. (Applause.) Is a love bomb a bottom noise that can be made whilst you’re making lo...you know, sometimes you’re... and then all of a sudden, you know that noise, it’s really awkward and you pretend you haven’t heard it?

Stephen Fry: Rob? Rob, can I remind you of something? Your father is in the audience.

Rob Brydon: He’s happy to go ‘that’s my boy! You’re putting Wales on the map, Robert!’

[About vampire bats.]

Stephen Fry: How do they ingest their blood? What do they do?

Alan Davies: They bite and sniff it up. Swallow it. Lick it. Slurp it. Hide it. Store it. Decant it.

Stephen Fry: Decant it!?

Stephen Fry: Where is the biggest load of rubbish in the world?

Audience Member: France.

Stephen Fry: How can you tell that God is a civil engineer? Because when he designed the human body, he put the recreational area right next to the sewage outflow.

Episode E.02: "Electricity"

Stephen Fry: Now the atmosphere is completely: um, what's the word I'm looking for?

Alan Davies: Electric?

[Forfeit Klaxon goes off - ELECTRIC]

Stephen Fry: Now, question one, I think. I'm naked; it's pouring down with rain. Can you give me a good reason why I should crouch down with my bottom in the air? [Jo immediately rings in; Stephen is already laughing.] Jo.

Jo Brand: Stephen, I wouldn't have thought you'd need a good reason.

[The number of British people killed by lightning each year]

Stephen Fry: It's between three and six, actually, it's not very many.

Alan Davies: Four or five.

Stephen Fry: You’re not doing badly, I must say. A fulsome pair of funbags there.

Jo Brand: You know what? That was almost heterosexual.

Alan Davies: But it wasn’t though, was it?

Episode E.03: "Eating"

["What were cornflakes originally used for?"]

Johnny Vegas: It was for, er, putting in mattresses, for monks, as, er, an anti-masturbation sound trigger device …

[The audience begins to laugh.]

Stephen Fry: Johnny Vegas, take some points!

Johnny Vegas: You're jokin'!

[The whole studio roars with laughter. It's revealed that Will Keith Kellogg was a Seventh Day Adventist, and originally made Corn Flakes in an attempt to inhibit masturbation.]

[After hearing that eating nothing but rabbit will eventually kill you]

Johnny Vegas: My dad killed my pet rabbit and fed it to me.

[The audience is stunned.]

Stephen Fry: Did he?! [kindly] Perhaps he was trying to kill you, Johnny.

Stephen Fry: When did rabbits arrive in Britain?

Alan Davies: Tuesday.

Stephen Fry: Do you remember what year it was?

Alan Davies: 3000 years ago. Tuesday morning.

Episode E.04: "Exploration"

Stephen Fry: I love the way your mind works, Alan Davies … and I use the word "works" quite wrongly.

Stephen Fry: Where do you put your ladder if you want it to go into space?

Rich Hall: On top of a spaceship. With a flag hanging on it, so other spaceships don't follow you too closely.

Bill Bailey: It's a conceptual question. How about this: Up against the wall of silence.

Stephen Fry: You should have railings build around you and people come and worship you as a kind of modern Buddha. You've got the look, I have to say.

Bill Bailey: Oh, thank you very much.

Stephen Fry: Buddha look.

Bill Bailey: Rural Buddha [in a West Country accent] Wisdom...and cheap cider.

[after several hare brained schemes have been proposed by the panellists]:

Bill Bailey: How about this: You could just...imagine.

Stephen Fry: Oh Bill, that is so beautiful.

Bill Bailey: 'Tis the wisdom of the rural Buddha.

Sean Lock: The Dalai Farmer.

Sean Lock: It’s like a mix between smug and orgasm.

Alan Davies: Smorgasm.

[On the problems of having sex in space]

Stephen Fry: The male member would be slightly smaller in space. 'Cause blood pressure is lower.

Rich Hall: In space, no one can hear you apologize.

[About the first words spoken from the surface of the moon]

Bill Bailey: Was it 'This is the Moon, this is the end of the line...'

Rich Hall: Great to be here in Philadelph—I mean, the Moon.

Episode E.05: "Europe"

David Mitchell: Edward VII took a lot of mercury.

Stephen Fry: I think he might have done.

David Mitchell: I thought it was for constipation. A very literal way of treating it. Drink a heavy liquid, force the poo down. Alternative would be, stand on your hands and have a lot of helium.

David Mitchell: [in imitation of an outraged right-winger] You don't take an active interest in how your country is run for just forty-five years, and look what happens!

Stephen Fry: Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit für das deutsche Vaterland! Danach lasst uns alle streben Brüderlich mit Herz und Hand!

Phill Jupitus: I have an erection.

Episode E.06: "Everything, Etc."

[Clive Anderson's buzzer is (Everything I Do) I Do It for You by Bryan Adams.]

Stephen Fry: Sometimes there just isn't enough vomit in the world.

Stephen Fry: And what are the symptoms of taking E? Do you know, Clive?

Clive Anderson: Um, I don't know, I haven't taken it myself. I've given ecstasy, but not …

Stephen: And who are the most dangerous cars driven by in the world?

Jeremy: Oh, are we talking about men or women, children, babies, dogs...

Stephen: No, nationalities. The most dangerous cars are green apparently, and driven by the Chinese.

Alan Davies: ...called tanks.

[On the composition of dust in a home]

Jeremy Clarkson: Animals, insects...

Clive Anderson: Dust mites.

Jeremy:...bits of smashed badgers.

[forfeit klaxon sounds]

Jeremy: [incredulous] Smashed badgers is coming up there!?

Stephen Fry: What would you find in the middle of a pearl??

Alan Davies: An oyster.

Jeremy Clarkson: [Whilst audience are laughing] No.

Stephen: [Surprised voice] You find an oyster in the middle of a pearl?!

[on getting his foot stuck in a giant clam]

Jeremy: I was going "I wonder what happens if you put your foot in that?" and [claps hands] BOOM! It's got a sort of velvety, soft, rather comfortable place to get stuck.

Stephen: Doesn't it start ingesting it and squirting enzymes at your foot?

Jeremy: I was more worried by the meter saying how much air I had left in the tanks.

Stephen: Aren't you supposed to have a buddy when you dive?

Jeremy: Oh, I did. That was my wife, she had buggered off.

Episode E.07: "Espionage"

Jo Brand: There's a great story about Conan Doyle, actually. Just for a joke, one day, he wrote a note saying, We are discovered. Flee immediately, and he sent it to five of his friends to see what they would do. And one of them disappeared!

Stephen Fry: There was a time when all the elevator cables were sheared off in the Empire State Building. Do you know about this story?

Clive Anderson: Yeah, there was a giant ape on the side of it.

Episode E.08: "Eyes & Ears"

David Mitchell: Fish don't blink. Which is the main eye defence. If you're ever trying to get the eye out of a fish and it blinks... it may be a lion.

Jimmy Carr: It's just so stupid, isn't it? Beating your wife... I mean, it's your wife- it's like keying your own car!

David Mitchell: Society just got a tiny bit worse...

Jimmy Carr: I like to think I can help.

Stephen Fry: What happens if an ear wig gets into your ear?

David Mitchell: It gets into your brain, and it stays there, and you form a sort of symbiotic relation with it. It happened to me 20 years ago, and we've never been happier!

[forfeit klaxon goes off - IT BORES INTO YOUR BRAIN]

Jimmy Carr: You know if a spider lays its eggs underneath your skin, think about how much worse it'd be if it was a goose.

[on baby cats]

Alan Davies: If you cut their whiskers off, they can get their head stuck in a milk bottle, I know that.

Stephen Fry: ...from experience?

Alan Davies: They will try, if you put something at the bottom like a bit of tuna.

David Mitchell: And if they do actually manage it, you end up with a lovely bottled cat! That you can take to a party. "I couldn't decide red or white, so I brought a cat."

[on the myth about the brace position preserving dental records]

David Mitchell: I've heard that and frankly, I don't know why they don't just tell people! "In the unlikely event of the plane crashing, I think we can all agree, you'd like to be identified. Bite down as hard as you can on your own armrest."

Episode E.09: "Entertainment" (Children in Need Special)

[Alan makes his entrance wearing an elephant mask.]

Alan Davies: I was the elephant in the room!

Stephen Fry: I know, it was brilliant.

Alan Davies: It was brilliant!

Stephen Fry: Well, bless him, when he arrived—I'm not wishing to sound patronising, but I've just said "bless him," so there's no way out—

Alan Davies: I took my nephews to London Zoo, because a friend of ours is a zoo-keeper there, and she can get you in sort of the back. And we went in to see a lion, and they said, "There's some mesh — there's small mesh and big mesh. You must stay on the side where the big mesh is. Don't go near the small mesh. Stay where the big mesh is. Do you understand?" And the kids went—[nods nervously] And we just went in, and my nephew turned to me and said, "What's mesh?"

Bill Bailey: I was in Brazil, and I went into an enclosure with a Jaguar. And this Brazilian handler said "It's very important: always approach from the front". And I went, right, okay, and I was just getting closer to the front of it. And then he said "Oh no, sorry, never. Sorry! My English..."

Stephen Fry: So that's all from Bill, Jo, Jeremy, Alan and Pudsey and me and I'll leave you with this thought about one form of entertainment we haven't covered tonight, from Noel Coward: "People are wrong when they say that opera is not what it used to be. It is exactly what it used to be, that is what is wrong with it." Good night.

Episode E.10: "England"

Stephen Fry: So that's the Cameroon's Eton tribe. They have other ethnic groups called the Bum, the Bang, the Banana, the Mang, the Fang, the Tang, the Wum, the Wam, the War, and, of course, the Pongo.

Sean Lock: Who discovered this tribe, Benny Hill?

Alan Davies: We had a Jimmy Glasscock at school.

Stephen Fry: Oh, did you?

Alan Davies: Yeah, you could always see when he was coming.

Episode E.11: "Endings"

Stephen Fry: What is pink, has pendulous breasts, gets sailors all excited and tastes of prime beef? [as Jimmy rings in] Yes?

Jimmy Carr: Was Princess Margaret buried at sea?

Stephen Fry: It was before Haile Selassie, there was an emperor...

Jimmy Carr: Lowly Selassie.

[on getting static shock]

Doon Mackichan: But some people say, it's because of passion, like when you meet the man or woman of your dreams, you have an electric shock.

Jimmy Carr: Sometimes if I meet an attractive woman, I will tazer her.

[Which island did Britain's fourth Antarctic expedition get stranded on in 1916?]

Jimmy Carr: Oh! Is it the Island of Reluctant but Inevitable Homosexuality? [laughter] I think I recognise it from that school trip that went horribly wrong …

Stephen Fry: Lord of the Undone Flies.

Episode E.12: "Empire" (Christmas Special)

[About why Germans like Mr. Bean]

Bill Bailey: There's a certain efficiency about it. [in German accent] "He does somesing, then he falls over. Is very amusing. Before, he vas valking in a straight line, so he's valking into the door! Is genius!"

Alan Davies: "Zis is vhat happens vhen you break ze rules!"

Bill Bailey: "Sometimes I stay up very late!"

[How to keep your children from peeking at their Christmas presents]

Alan Davies: Blind them.

Episode E.13: "Elephants" (Compilation Episode)

Phill Jupitus: [stuffing his face with spaghetti] Can I just say, this is the best quiz I've ever been on.

Stephen Fry: And how are you eating yours, Alan?

Alan Davies: By hand.

Stephen Fry: Do you know, the thing is, Alan gets 20 points, because that’s how Neopolitans eat spaghetti. They lean back and drop it into their mouths by hand.

Jimmy Carr: That’s not fair! Alan thinks mashed potatoes are finger food!

Stephen Fry: They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is … [Stephen flubs the line, causing the panellists to rib him mercilessly for the next 3-4 minutes as he tries to nail it for the recording - he eventually manages to force out to great applause:] … there are no straight lines!

Jimmy Carr: Do they? [sigh]

Alan Davies: Whatever …

Series F

Episode F.01 "Families" (Children in Need)

Stephen Fry: What's the most famous line from a Tarzan film?

Ronni Ancona: Oh, "Me Tarzan, you Jane."

Stephen Fry: Yes, except of course it never happened.

Ronni Ancona: What?!

David Mitchell: Why do these films always forget to put their most famous lines in?

Stephen Fry: How has the Eurovision Song Contest made Europe a better place?

Terry Wogan: How has it made it a better place? Because it has, as you can see, the dove, it has brought together the nations of Europe-

Stephen Fry: Has it arse, it's divided East from West.

[On Bertrand Russell's proof that 1 + 1 = 2]

Stephen Fry: In order to prove mathematics from the very beginning, you have to establish the first principle of arithmetic, and that piece of symbolic logic was proving that one plus one equals two.

David Mitchell: It’s a bit late, the 20th century, to prove that, I’d say.

Stephen Fry: A bit late?

David Mitchell: You’ve got quite a lot riding by the 20th century on one plus one being two, you know? There’s quite a lot of engineering happening. Quite a complex international economy. If you find out that it doesn’t equal two, what do we do? Just burn everything! God know anything could fall on our heads. Money, you might as well eat it. Forget civilisation!

Episode F.02 "Fire and Freezing" (Christmas Special)

[on smoke signals]

Rob Brydon: Was that before or after email?

Stephen Fry: [grins] It's... close. They were spamming though, you'd get endless streams! [pretending to fan smoke] "do-you-want-a-big-ger-cock?"

Stephen Fry: What happened to the fireman's pole?

Rob Brydon: He tiled the fireman's bathroom.

[attempting a Richard Burton impression]

Rob Brydon: "When a baby cries it's first cry when it's born it's crying out knowing..." [audience member giggles] Shut up. [more laughter] You wouldn't know a good impression if it sat on your face!

Rob Brydon: I'm from the same town as Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins.

Stephen Fry: And Michael Sheen.

Rob Brydon: And Michael Sheen, of course. In fact, my father grew up in the same street, literally the same street, as Anthony Hopkins.

Stephen Fry: Yeah... In England we live in houses.

Stephen Fry: You know how sometimes it can be too cold to snow, yeah?

[There’s complete silence.]

Rob Brydon: Is that a question?

Stephen Fry: Yeah. You know how it can be too cold to snow?

Rob Brydon: Yes, because you need some moisture...

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - YES]

Rob Brydon: You really hate me, don’t you?

Episode F.03 "Flotsam and Jetsam"

Alan Davies: Did you really work that out?

Charlie Higson: Some of us paid attention at school, Alan.

Alan Davies: That one again! That seems to be the root of all my problems.

[After hearing about how the East German secret police used to take swabs of dissidents' body odour in order to identify them]

Charlie Higson: It does sound like a new perfume range, though, doesn't it? "Dissidence, from Calvin Klein."

Stephen Fry: Anyway. The Borgia Pope celebrated the feast of chestnuts by an evening of prostitute-racing in the Vatican.

Stephen Fry: [while explaining about the formula used to determine the number of times a paper could be folded] … what you need is length and thickness.

Alan Davies: That will get ripped off and straight onto YouTube. That will also become a ringtone. "What you need is length and thickness." [mimes accepting a call] "Hello?"

Stephen Fry: Damn you all. You want--

Alan Davies: And that'll be for text messages.

Episode F.04 "Fight or Flight"

Stephen Fry: I believe, that you, as it happens, obviously, like Alan, felt some erotic feelings towards your instructor, is that correct?

Pam Ayres: I did. I took a shine to the instructor. I think that’s why I jumped out the aircraft, really. Cos I wanted to impress him.

Johnny Vegas: I often do that. If I like a woman, I jump out of the window.

Stephen Fry: Do you know what the French for "flying fish" is?

Alan Davies: Poisson … d'aeroplane …?

Stephen Fry: What's the opposite of a flying fish?

Sean Lock: Tunnelling flamingo!

Stephen Fry: Name something that's much easier to do when you're wearing boxing gloves.

Sean Lock: Frisk a porcupine.

Stephen Fry: Very good!

Johnny Vegas: Give up masturbating!

Episode F.05 "France"

[audience member inexplicably starts laughing hysterically]

Stephen Fry: Nurse! Nurse! She's out of bed again!

[After confirming that the reason Tour de France cyclists shave their legs has nothing to do with aerodynamics or speed]

Hugh Dennis: It's a shame it doesn't make any difference, because I've been using the fact that I don't shave my legs as an excuse for going five hours slower than the guy who won.

Stephen Fry: Which stage did you do?

Hugh Dennis: There's an open stage every year. An amateur stage. You do it two weeks before they do it. Eight thousand of us, and by the end, there were four thousand of us left at the end of it. I started in 2400th place, and I finished in 3400th place.

Stephen Fry: Oh no.

Alan Davies: You mean a thousand people overtook you?

Hugh Dennis: I was passed by a thousand people. And it took me... it took eleven hours to do this stage. The winner of the actual proper stage when they did it the next week was a guy called Vinokourov, I think his name was. He did it in five hours, but he was using someone else’s blood. And he was thrown out of the stage that night for blood doping.

Phill Jupitus: [Laughing.] Someone else’s blood!

Hugh Dennis: But it took me nine hours to catch up to the bloke with the one leg.

Phill Jupitus: [on the Bayeux Tapestry] That says 'Wil 6 Elm'.

Alan Davies: Normmano. I like that.

Phill Jupitus: Is that like medieval text speak? They never put the whole thing in. They just sort of... C U l8er.

Alan Davies: We have been con-kered

Phill Jupitus: 'We've invaded Britain. lol'

Stephen Fry: O … M … G! Very good.

Episode F.06 "Fakes and Frauds"

[About the superb lyrebird]

Jimmy Carr: It can mimic anything? I'd make it woof. How funny would that be, if you had a bird that woofed?

Alan Davies: I'd get it to do limericks.

Marcus Brigstocke: I'd probably get it to do Bill Oddie.

Stephen Fry: Surely that would be a bearded tit, if it was anything.

Alan Davies: You're thinking of Rory McGrath.

[On the superb lyrebird imitating a chainsaw]

Jimmy Carr: I can't see that bird surviving for much longer if it's doing impressions of the chainsaw that's coming toward it.

Sean Lock: Salamanders can go in fire, can't they?

Stephen Fry: Yes, that's the legend, presumably that's what happened.

Marcus Brigstocke: How long can a salamander go in fire?

Sean Lock: 'till it's cooked!

Stephen Fry: The Eiffel Tower. They loathed it. Guy de Maupassant loathed it so much that his favourite restaurant was …?

Alan Davies: The "Eiffel Tower is Crap" Bistro.

Stephen Fry: No, it was in the Eiffel Tower.

Alan Davies: Oh, so he didn't have to look at it.

Stephen Fry: So—exactly. The one place in Paris he couldn't see the Eiffel Tower was inside the Eiffel Tower.

Marcus Brigstocke: Could he not maybe just ask for a chair facing the other way?

Stephen Fry: He was a French writer trying to make a point, and therefore a git.

Stephen Fry: Now, how many commandments are there?

Jimmy Carr: Are we talking about the commandments that God dictated to Moses on Mount Sinai?

Stephen Fry: Yeah.

Jimmy Carr: Literally none, never happened.

[on how the king of Syracuse asked Archimedes to find out if his crown was made of real gold]

Alan Davies: I put it in the bath?

Stephen Fry: Mm, yeah...

Jimmy Carr: What, does gold go small and wrinkly in the bath?

Sean Lock: That's your crown jewels!

[on sword swallowing]

Jimmy Carr: I think that the actual secret of doing it is to do it really quick and if it gets caught on anything... just jab it.

Stephen Fry: So this particular man, Archimedes, pondering this problem that he’d been given by the king gets in the bath, sees the water rise, and leaps out of the bath shouting...

Alan Davies: Eureka!

Stephen Fry: Exactly.

Sean Lock: I really thought you were gonna say ‘Arsenal!’ then, Alan.

Episode F.07 "Fingers and Fumbs"

Stephen Fry: In this episode, there is a special forfeit if you use a particular F word...

Jo Brand: Oh, fuck off.

[Special Klaxon goes off with F*#@ displayed]

Stephen Fry: It was almost a clever double-bluff that it would be that word.

[Later, in the same conversation]

Stephen Fry: Alan, do you enjoy fargling?

Alan Davies: Am I fargling now?

Stephen Fry: No.

Stephen Fry: By the way, does anyone know, incidentally, what is the best opening move of Paper, Scissors, Stone?

Dara Ó Briain: If you say, "You go first"

Jo Brand: Is it a real rock?

[after being asked to hold pencils in their mouths]

Dara Ó Briain: it doef feem like a bad move in a fpoken wowd comedy fhow, I'm chofing my wowds vewy cawefully hewe, to effenfially difable the fouw conteftants.

Stephen Fry: What's the ideal way to kiss a Frenchman?

Alan Davies: A French man? [laughing] I don't know. With their consent?

Stephen Fry: Very well put! What a nice young man.

[About the number of kisses given as a greeting in certain regions]

Stephen Fry: And 5 is Corsica, I suppose...

Dara Ó Briain: 5?! They really have very little to do in Corsica do they?

Stephen Fry: Can you tell me what sort of person kisses 5 times? "Cors-i-can!"

Alan Davies: If you're unsure about whether to do one cheek or two, best way to deal with it is to cup their genitals while you're doing it, and they won't mind how many kisses.

Stephen Fry: [laughing] Cup their genitals! After the words "Carry your bag, sir?"

Stephen Fry: How would you describe the famous Thatcher effect?

Phill Jupitus: Yes. You get the country to bend over, and you give it one till its eyes water.

Jo Brand: It was great actually when she became Lady Thatcher, because then she sounded like a device removing pubic hair.

[About the Mona Lisa]

Stephen Fry: The University of Amsterdam used emotion recognition software to analyse the famous enigmatic smile.

Phill Jupitus: Or looked at her. "Emotion recognition software"? I don't know. My money's on "bored." What do you reckon?

Stephen Fry: It showed that it was 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry. She was less than 1% neutral and not even a quarter of one percent surprised.

Phill Jupitus: Sounds like a breakdown of the audience.

Episode F.08 "Fashion"

Reginald D. Hunter: I was at a party here, and this guy was telling me about when he wore corduroy, and he says, "You're an American, do you know what corduroy is?" And I said, "No." And he went on to try and explain it, and eventually four or five people were around me, drunk, trying to explain to me what corduroy was. And eventually this girl who we didn't notice left the room, and she went upstairs to her apartment, and she just dashed in the room with a corduroy jacket, "Here! This is what it is! This is what it is!" And you know, I just … I went along with it because there's nothing like the warm look on white people's faces when they feel like they're teaching you something.

Stephen Fry: My grandfather was a Hungarian Jew, he said "A Hungarian is the only man who can follow you into a revolving door and come out first."

[on that London is not the city with the most Michelin stars in the world]

Reginald D. Hunter: I feel that any country that can produce marmite, they started later than everybody else in trying to make food taste good.

Stephen Fry: This from a country that has spray-on cheese?

Stephen Fry: My name is Stephen "My Bottom Is a Treasure-house" Fry; Thank you and good night.

Episode F.09 "The Future"

Stephen Fry: [to the camera] If you are watching QI now, and you believe in astrology, you are banned from watching in future. You are not allowed; you must turn it over now. Thank you.

Alan Davies: They had vacuum cleaners in America in the 19th century, and they were huge, and they had to go on the back of a car drawn by horses.

Stephen Fry: [pedantic] I remember seeing that on a programme called QI! ...But well remembered!

Stephen Fry: Now. Picture the scene. I'm out windsurfing. The breeze is ruffling my trousers and sun-bleached hair. I look up, and I see on the horizon a ship. How far away is it?

Alan Davies: Twenty-one miles.

Stephen Fry: No.

Alan Davies: I thought it was always twenty-one miles.

Stephen Fry: No.

Alan Davies: I didn't even get flagged for that.

Stephen Fry: No, no, I didn't know that anybody always thought that it was twenty-one miles.

Episode F.10 "Flora and Fauna"

Stephen Fry: [pointing to the red flower in his buttonhole] What does my buttonhole tell you about me?

Jo Brand: That you're a closet heterosexual?

Stephen Fry: How dare you!

[After discussing how the heroine of La Dame aux Camélias wore a red camellia instead of a white one to indicate when she was on her period]

Stephen Fry: And the film based on La Dame aux Camélias is …?

Jo Brand: Carry On Menstruating.

Stephen Fry: Do you know the difference between a frog and a toad?

Alan Davies : Spelling.

Stephen Fry: What do you call a slug with a shell?

Alan Davies: I’m not falling for that one.

Episode F.11: "Film and Fame"

David Mitchell: There's one of those adverts that sort of says 'There are more germs on your chopping board than on your loo seat.' To which the answer is, 'well clearly that's fine, then.'

Emma Thompson: [pointing at Stephen] I used to do that to him, actually, make sure that he couldn't get out while I was changing.

Stephen Fry: You did.

Emma Thompson: Yeah. It was very good fun.

Stephen Fry: She used to show me her breasts. [He rhymes the word with "beasts".]

Emma Thompson: This fantastic effect I used to have on him, 'cause I could make—I could do it now—I'm not going to, but I could—I could make him scream.

Stephen Fry: [small scream] No. No. Don't.

Emma Thompson: Not like that scream that we just heard, but a real, actual sort of scream of terror and fright, just by appearing nude at the top of his stairs. [Stephen shudders.] And doing what I like to do, which is locking all the doors at the bottom, so that when he tried to get out … [Stephen mimes pounding on locked doors] … as I came down the stairs, going, "Yes, baby, they're all yours!" By the end of which he was in a state of such extreme panic, and it's great to make someone very clever fall apart like that.

Stephen Fry: [to Emma Thompson, about her pubic hair] Do you wax yourself down there, dovey?

Emma Thompson: [gets up intimidatingly] Do you want to see?

Stephen Fry: [collapses] No! I don't want to see! No, I do not. Oh, God!

Emma Thompson: You know I'd do it.

Stephen Fry: I know you would. She'd envelope me in her skirt.

Alan Davies: Lock the doors! Lock the doors! Ye of faint of heart, leave immediately!

Emma Thompson: You know the word "luvvie"?

Stephen Fry: Yeah?

Emma Thompson: What do you all feel about it?

Stephen Fry: I mean, I'm not going to get as upset as some actors do—some actors say, "We do a bloody hard job at work, we're serious people, we—you know, it's a coal face, doing a play! How dare they call us luvvies!" You know? I mean, that's a bit overdone. On the other hand, it's a bit tedious when the Daily Mail says "luvvie couple XYZ" or something …

Emma Thompson: Do you know what the first citation of it is in the OED?

Stephen Fry: No.

Emma Thompson: It's you.

Stephen Fry: gasps

[Whistles go off and the words "Luvvie Alarm" flash on the screen.]

Stephen Fry: No! I can't believe... Did I invent the word?

Emma Thompson: Yeah, it's you sometime in the 1980s.

Stephen Fry: Did I? I'm ashamed.

Episode F.12: "Food"

Stephen Fry: I'm inclined to give the point to Rich, because he's sort of accidentally right, only he's sort of wrong as well.

Rich Hall: As usual.

Stephen Fry: What can you usefully teach an oyster? [David rings in] Yes?

David Mitchell: Is it … you know … not to get its hopes up? To expect … lemon juice and death?

Jimmy Carr: The feeding of the five thousand? Like there's five thousand people and they wanted some bread and fish. I reckon that was just about four and a half thousand people going, "What have we got, bread and fish? I'm all right, thanks. I'll have something when I get home."

David: The other interesting thing about that story is that out of the five thousand people, only two of them had thought to bring any food. And so in a way it's, okay, good miracle, but the other side of it is 4,998 idiots with no sense of foresight at all. And Jesus doesn't make them learn a lesson from that!

Stephen Fry: "This is the sermon on the Mount. This isn't Glastonbury," he could have said, couldn't he?

David Mitchell: But, you know, he should have said "You didn't bring any food! Of course there's not gonna be any food! Think about it!" ... "Plan next time! Judea would be better if people planned!" But no. "Yeah, it always works out fine; Jesus'll magic up some grub!" No! He's gonna get crucified one day, and then what are you gonna eat?

Stephen Fry: Name a poisonous snake.

Jimmy Carr: Piers Morgan.

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - PIERS MORGAN]

[About the Canadian Mounted Police.]

David Mitchell: It’s like trying to police a country with Daleks.

Jimmy Carr: Which’d never work with the disabled access we’ve got now. The Daleks can get everywhere.

David Mitchell: Jimmy, are you saying that you think that disabled access is a Dalek conspiracy?

Jimmy Carr: Yes. That is exactly what I’m saying.

Alan Davies: Poison is not the same as venom. It can’t be. Because there are loads of poisonous snakes.

Jimmy Carr: You sounded so like Jonathan Creek just then. You just somehow, with the pen, it’s just so right.

Stephen Fry: I’ve got the answer! In a locked room.

Series G

Episode G.1 "Gardens"

[Alan is testing his gentleman gardener's saw on the table, despite Stephen's protests]

David Mitchell: I really wish they hadn't made the set out of asbestos.

Stephen Fry: Now, before we move on, we’d like you to draw now, you should have a card if you haven’t sawn it in half. We’d like you to draw the world’s first novelty teapot.

[Alan blows the sawdust on his desk aside and coughs as it goes everywhere.]

Stephen Fry: Alan.

Alan Davies: Sorry, it all went down... it’s quite a draught in here as it turns out.

Stephen Fry: What did I ask you to draw?

Alan Davies: Draw the world’s first novelty teapot.

Stephen Fry: Damn, you were listening. That’s very good.

Stephen Fry: [both arms on his waist] Do you know that rhyme, "I'm a little teapot, short an stout, [looks right] here's my handle, [looks left] oh bugger, I'm a sugar bowl!"

[Stephen has explained that the best place to find new species is your own garden]

Alan Davies: Still going rainforest. I'm sorry.

Stephen Fry: Yes, but you'd have to travel thousands of miles, you'd have to park there, you'd have to look, you'd have to, you know -

Alan Davies: Park?!

[Audience bursts into laughter, Stephen looks as if he can't believe what he's just said]

Alan Davies: You know when you find a bee, and it's crawling on its last legs.

Rob Brydon: I always rescue them.

Alan Davies: You give it honey. It's the only thing they eat, makes sense when you think about it.

[audience laughter]

Alan Davies: No point in just talking to it. Give it honey!

David Mitchell: They're very much a one-recipe species, aren't they?

Dara Ó Briain: I'm intrigued, because I would, um, I generally give it a sole of my shoe. You know, not to be harsh, but…

Alan Davies: [exasperated] You step on a struggling, crawling bee? Trying to get back to the hive?

Dara Ó Briain: What? As opposed to rehabilitate it?

Alan Davies: I like honey! I have it on my porridge! You murderer!

David Mitchell: [after the argument has gone on for a while] But isn't it true, though, that a bee, in its entire lifetime, makes absolutely tiny amount of honey overall? So you don't have to give much rehabilitating honey to this one bee before the nation, the world, is making a net loss! I mean, it's useless. If you only get one teaspoon of honey from a whole bee's lifetime, and every time you have to get it back on its feet it takes a teaspoon and a half, suddenly there's no honey at all! You're insulting it apart from anything else! It's like showing a very tired mason a whole cathedral!

Stephen Fry: What makes Australian spiders so dangerous?

Rob Brydon: It’s their cunning and their organisation, Stephen. And the fact they’re willing to put the man hours in. They will stalk you for weeks, they’ll look for patterns in your behaviour, and they’ll strike when you least expect it.

Episode G.2 "Ganimals"

Stephen Fry: What use is a goose?

Sandi Toksvig: [dead serious] Is it toilet paper? [general laughter] No, seriously. Is it - [more laughter]

Stephen Fry: Sandi, that is bizarre. Why do you say that?

Sandi Toksvig: Well, because I once read this book by Rabelais, I think it was called Gargantua. And he recommended that the best thing for toilet paper was a live goose. And I have yet to check in to a five-star hotel without a sense of disappointment.

Stephen Fry: So that's the uses of gooses or the eese of geese.

Sean Lock : Is the next question on the habits of rabbits?

Stephen Fry : Oh, I wish that it were.

Sean Lock : How far can you shove a dove?

Alan Davies : Hats of cats. That's my offer.

[On giraffes]

Stephen Fry: So there you are. There are these beautiful animals, and they are graceful and sweet and long eyelashes and sexy and rather desirable in many ways…

Sandi Toksvig: Good thing you're tall.

Stephen Fry: What's the commonest cause of death among mountain goats?

Bill Bailey: [hitting his buzzer] BRIAN BLESSED.

[About gerbils]

Bill Bailey: You can freeze them and then, er, hit them over a wall with a cricket bat.

Episode G.3 "Games"

Stephen Fry: Which popular game traditionally ends with all of the participants being thrown into a lake of fiery sulfur?

Sean Lock: I hope it's show jumping. I hate show jumping!

[On Ouija boards]

Stephen Fry: …But the reference in the Bible to the fiery lake or whatever is from Revelations, where it does say that those who practice the magic arts will be cast into burning sulfur.

Phill Jupitus: How about balloon animals?

Stephen Fry: The punishment for people who do balloon animals is not specified in the Book of Revelations.

Sean Lock: I think it's loneliness, their punishment

Sean Lock: You could do it with other sports, couldn't you, though?

Stephen Fry: Yeah, go on.

Sean Lock: I don't know. Chugby.

Stephen Fry: Chugby?

Sean Lock: Chess and rugby.

Stephen Fry: Chess and rugby. I like that.

Alan Davies: Darts and swimming.

Stephen Fry: Ooh.

Alan Davies: Swarts.... Or dimming.

Stephen Fry: Or dimming.

Alan Davies: Underwater darts. Would that work?

Stephen Fry: Oh, yes, I like the sound of that.

Alan Davies: Or... Darts at swimmers.

Episode G.4 "Geography"

Rob Brydon: Friends of mine, back in Wales, quite a few of them have got Welsh - it's not a famous voice but it's a Welsh SatNav, which basically goes, you know -

Stephen Fry: In Welsh language?

Rob Brydon: No, no, no, just with Welsh attitude. 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. [with utter disappointment] Ohh, you plank! You've missed it. [bored, motioning with his finger] Now, do a u-ie, do a u-ie. Do it! No - don't - oh, [cynical] pull over, attach a hose pipe to the exhaust and just end it all."

Stephen Fry: What are large - very large - blue, rare, slow-moving, have calfs...

Jimmy Carr: Ah, look at Alan's face!

Stephen Fry: ...suffer from wet bottoms, and are found all over the world?

Alan Davies: [with a sly grin, pointing his finger at Stephen] Not the blue whale!

Episode G.5 "Groovy" (Christmas Special)

[After David Tennant has answered a historical question correctly]

Alan Davies: It's all the time travel he does! He knows something about every era.

Stephen Fry: [cough] He's acting. [cough]

Bill Bailey: It's not real? [sounds agitated] What do you mean? What do you mean?

David Tennant: Don't listen to him. [glares at Stephen]

Stephen Fry: [raises a hand apologetically] I'm sorry!

Bill Bailey: [leans towards David] Don't tell me it's not real!

David Tennant: [whispering] Don't listen to the bad man!

Bill Bailey: I know, it’s a documentary, I know.

David Tennant: Yes, Exactly.

Alan Davies: Cybermen are real. Saw one in the corridor upstairs looking for you.

Stephen Fry: At school, we used to do what we called quad hockey, which is like a polo, only on bikes. You use a hockey stick and a ball, and you just go round on, um…

Bill Bailey: On quad bikes?

Stephen Fry: No, not on quad bikes. In a quad. In a quadrangle.

Bill Bailey: You were playing hockey in a quadrangle? You had a very different sort of schooling to a lot of us.

Stephen Fry: Why? How is that different?

Lee Mack: Well, in my school, we used to set fire to cars. In an octangle.

Alan Davies: The Nazis banned smoking?

Stephen Fry: The Nazis, yeah, they had very strong anti-smoking…

Bill Bailey: The more I hear about them, the less I like them.

Alan Davies: "Well that's the final straw!"

Stephen Fry: "Up until this point, I've been prepared to listen…"

Alan Davies: "Oh, I can rationalise everything else, but that …"

Lee Mack: You can't damn it and damn it and double damn it. You could damn it and damn it and triple damn it.

Stephen Fry: Yeah. That was his mistake.

Bill Bailey: [eyeing David] ...chairman of the pedantic society.

Lee Mack: Vice chairman actually. [grins]

[On the term 'cool' becoming to mean 'fashionable' in 1933 - the year Hitler came to power]

Bill Bailey: [mimicking German accent] "Zees new uniforms are cool!"

[General laughter]

Bill Bailey: [ironically] So this is Christmas...

Alan Davies: [mimicking German accent] "I joined ze Nazi party. Zey're cool, daddy-o!"

Bill Bailey: "Cool, daddy-o!"

Alan Davies: "And bezides, I have no choice."

Bill Bailey: "I burned down a Reichstag. Cool!"

David Tennant: I’ll tell you what annoyed me, if it’s 5 items or fewer, then it’s 5 items or fewer! Don’t come in with 6 and stand in front of me.

Stephen Fry: You look in their basket?

David Tennant: You bet I do. Yeah. And then say absolutely nothing.

Episode G.6 "Genius"

[On children]

Alan Davies: I thought you were supposed to play natural sounds because the noises of contemporary life are extremely distractive and create behavioral difficulties. That's why you mustn't have television on 'til they're four, or something like that.

Dara Ó Briain: That's not how parenting works, my friend. You have the television - you train them to like the television as quickly as you possibly can!

Alan Davies: [laughing] Because there was no ADHD until television was invented, they kind of coincide…

Dara Ó Briain: They're happy with HD, my friend.

[On a painting of Leonardo da Vinci's deathbed, Alan has spotted a figure looking very much like Rodney Bewes]

David Mitchell: What a weird, unsettling thing to discover that would be, in the context of the credit crunch and everything, suddenly to discover that Rodney Bewes was immortal. Just imagine, on the news, them going: "And today it emerged that actor Rodney Bewes has been alive for as long as time."

Graham Norton: Given the things that we're talking about, or pretending to know what we're talking about, I actually really don't know who Rodney Bewes is.

[After Stephen has explained who Rodney Bewes is]

Stephen Fry: I have to say, the whole point about QI, right, is that the rest of the world talks about cultural things, reality TV and pop stars and Rodney Bewes… and we talk about Leonardo. And what you've done [motions towards Graham] by coming on is we started - no, you actually. [turns to point at Alan] We started talking about Leonardo and we've arrived at Rodney Bewes! That's the wrong direction!

Graham Norton: I didn't even know who he was!

Stephen Fry: How old are you?

[Silence, which then turns into laughter]

Graham Norton: [flirtatiously] How old do I look?

Alan Davies: [flirtatiously] How old do I feel?

David Mitchell: Just shows you the effect of this game, though. You ask a question, all four of us think: "That is something I definitely know the answer to, but I've been made so uncertain, and frightened about that, [motions behind himself - referring to the klaxon] that I'm not even willing to give my own age, name, or address".

Dara Ó Briain: How can it be a trap? How can this possibly be a trap? I AM thirty-seven. Look! [hits the buzzer - Dublin, Ó Briain] Thirty-seven! There we go. No points lost...

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - DARA - 37]

Dara Ó Briain: BUT THAT'S NOT WRONG!

David Mitchell: DON'T ACCEPT IT: YOU ARE!

Dara Ó Briain: I actually am!

Graham Norton: We should all do it.

David Mitchell: Yeah, alright. [hits the buzzer - Peterhouse, Mitchell] 34.

Stephen Fry: 34, eh?

David Mitchell: 34.

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - DAVID - 34]

Stephen Fry: [to Graham] You don't want to do this, do you?

Graham Norton: No, I'll do it. [hits the buzzer - Cork, Norton] Graham Norton, 46.

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - GRAHAM - 46]

Alan Davies: I'm not doing it...

[After Stephen has explained that 98% of the atoms in the human body are replaced yearly]

David Mitchell: I think some of my socks are older than I am. I feel like I should defer to them.

Stephen Fry: How many brains did the the man with two brains have?

Alan Davies: …Two?

Stephen Fry: Yes! That's brilliant!

David Mitchell: [Banging both fists on the table] It's so cruel!

Stephen Fry: He's wise enough to spot a double bluff!

David Mitchell: It's just the technique of the bully! You hit us! And then you go: [with appropriate mimicry] "Oh, you thought I was going to hit you! I wouldn't hit you. I'm not going to hit you. This is my hand to stroke you." And we go: "Aargh, aargh, he's stroking us!"

Episode G.7 "Girls and Boys"

Stephen Fry: But even more extraordinary is the word 'girl'. Right up until mid 15th century...

Alan Davies: Boys were called girls?

Stephen Fry: Yes.

Alan Davies: They were!?

Stephen Fry: All children... You're having to rethink everything, aren't you?

Alan Davies: This is the most extraordinary episode yet!

[Panellists can win extra points by buzzing at a sexist comment]

Sandi Toksvig: I, I like pink. 'Pink makes the boys wink'. And I think that's right. I've known boys who've been complete winkers. Marvellous thing, pink.

Jack Dee: I, uh, sorry. [rings in] Bit sexist, wasn't that.

Sandi Toksvig: [leans forward] Now, Jack, I've only just started. This is the beginning, my dear.

Jack Dee: I'm gonna come down you like a…

Stephen Fry: Hello!

Jack Dee: …ton of bricks.

Sandi Toksvig: [nonchalantly] Would be the first boy in my life to have done so.

Stephen Fry: They can get a man on the moon, but they can't get one on Sandi.

[On why there are few female guests on QI]

Sandi Toksvig: Is it because women are just not funny?

Stephen Fry: [gasps]

Ronni Ancona: [imitating deep Southern woman] Now, that's right, but we're good at other things, we're good at raisin' kittens and knittin' cakes!

[About two minutes after this, Ronni and Sandi are still talking]

Sandi Toksvig: It feels extraordinary to sit next to a women...

[Jack's buzzer goes off]

Stephen Fry: Oh, hello.

Jack Dee: Is it because once they start they never shut up?

Sandi Toksvig: I think there's a scientific relationship between a sense of humour and the male sex organ.

Alan Davies: People are always laughing at mine.

[On how to conceive a girl]

Alan Davies: Friend of ours had a baby in Thailand. English couple. And the Thai woman said to her: "If you look lovely when you pregnant, you will have girl. If you look tired and ugly, dress badly, you will have boy." And she said: "What do you think I'm gonna have?" "Boy."

Stephen Fry: [laughing] Outrageous!

Alan Davies: And she did!

Episode G.8 "Germany"

Rob Brydon: Now, the socks that man in the middle is wearing, very long socks, and just out of interest for you, that’s something that I’ve turned to recently. I now favour the longer sock.

Stephen Fry: Do you? Can you take me through your reasoning?

Rob Brydon: Yes, I can, I’ll show you. [He slowly pulls up his trouser leg.] The gentleman’s sock. Now Jo, you as a lady, you’re gonna think this sock is gonna stop a lot sooner than it does. So watch this. Look at that. Surely you’ve reached the peak. Surely we’ve peaked.

Stephen Fry: Oh, my word! He’s wearing tights!

Rob Brydon: Can I say, not so much for Jo, but Stephen, Alan and Sean, I urge you to give it a go. Because it gives you a feeling of security.

Jo Brand: They do make you look like a nob-head.

[Rob has given an enthusiastic speech about the brilliance of long socks]

Sean Lock: I just wonder what's gonna happen to you when you go, like, skydiving. You go: "Wow! [spreading his hands] That's incredible! Forget the socks! This is amazing!"

Rob Brydon: I have been skydiving.

Sean Lock: Have you tried jelly? That's nice.

Stephen Fry: What happens in Germany at 11:11 on the 11th of November every year?

Alan Davies: [completely deadpan] Everything carries on as normal.

Episode G.9 "Gallimaufrey"

[The panel is playing Call my Bluff with 18th century phrases]

Alan Davies: I can't stand Call my Bluff. Why are we playing Call my Bluff? It's a shit game! We've invented a really good game, why are we playing a shit one?

[On the Queen not being legally required to have a driving licence]

Phill Jupitus: What does she show in Blockbuster...?

Stephen Fry: A twenty pound note.

Episode G.10 "Greats"

Stephen Fry: Now, tell me about the "Great Disappointment".

Jo Brand: Have you been talking to my husband?

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - HAVE YOU BEEN TALKING TO MY HUSBAND?]

Stephen Fry: Why are so many great men short?

David Mitchell: [doubtfully] Are they really?

Stephen Fry: David, David. You've hit the nail on the head. Rem acu tetigisti, as they would say in latin.

David Mitchell: …I'm sure they would.

Sean Lock: It means: 'Nice one, son'.

[On cheese having a sell-by date and "consume within 2 days of opening"]

David Mitchell: It's gone off already, I mean, cheese basically, hasn't it?

Stephen Fry: That's it's point, exactly. It is the celebration of what happens when milk goes off big time styley.

Sean Lock: It should just: you should work for the milk marketing mob. Get some lovely "English milk gone off big time styley". "I'll have a 'milk gone off big time styley and tomato sandwich' please." That's a brilliant description!

Stephen Fry: 'Heightism' does exist. Short people are paid less on average than tall people. The disparity is comparable in magnitude to race and gender.

Alan Davies: They should rise up.

Stephen Fry: Yeah… Hey!

[After discussing the Giant Tortoise]

David Mitchell: How did they exist in the wild anyway if they're so delicious, slow moving and massively useful?

Episode G.11 "Gifts"

Stephen Fry: Name and shame the worlds cheapest cheapskate.

Jan Ravens: [rings in] Was it Diogenes the Cynic?

Stephen Fry: …Wow.

Jimmy Carr: You've seen this show before, haven't you? I think I'm slightly aroused.

Alan Davies: I can confirm 'slightly'.

[On dance fly]

Stephen Fry: It captures an insect, sucks out its innards completely, and then wraps the empty shell in silk. And then gives it to the female, but by the time the female's unwrapped it, and discovered that as it were her box of chocolates is empty, he's already mated with her and scarpered.

Clive Anderson: [to the audience] Now, don't try this at home!

Stephen Fry: Now, what would you call someone who never laughs?

Alan Davies: [points towards the audience] That bloke.

Stephen Fry: [laughing] You're right. He hasn't cracked a smile the whole evening.

Alan Davies: He might be dead. Nudge him.

Episode G.12 "Gravity"

[On the "Earth sandwich"]

Stephen Fry:…There was an immediate controversy, 'cos they used baguettes. And so they weren't quite sure whether they were oriented in the same direction. It might have been a cross shape, which would have disqualified it as a sandwich, really, you can't have a sandwich baguettes crossing, can you?

Bill Bailey: How do you get to be involved in these competitions?

[On equipment doctors leave in patients]

Barry Humphries: This is when we need Hugh Laurie on this show, isn't it?

Stephen Fry: He would explain it, exactly. If the script was put in front of him. He's a gibbering idiot without it.

Bill Bailey: I dressed as Hitler once. I did a school play, I played Arturo Ui in The resistible rise of Arturo Ui. And I was Ui. I actually dyed my hair black and cut it in the Hitler style for the authenticity of the role, not cause I'm a Nazi, and my mum said "Oh, now that does look nice.".

Episode G.13 "Gothic"

Jack Dee: I was a goth for a while.

Stephen Fry: Were you?

Jack Dee: I was asked to leave, 'cos I was just too miserable.

Sue Perkins: You were bringing them down.

Alan Davies: I was an emu for a while.

Sue Perkins: When did the hand come out?

Jack Dee: What’s the difference between an emo and a goth? I missed that.

Alan Davies: One’s a flightless bird. The other one’s a horny headed vandal.

[On zombie apocalypse]

Stephen Fry: Alan, you're a zombie. You bite Jimmy. Jimmy, you're now a zombie, you bite Jack. Jack, Jack bites Mel, and so on.

Alan Davies: [pointing at Sue Perkins, who's rolling her eyes] Sue.

Stephen Fry: What?

Alan Davies: Sue!

Stephen Fry: [Realizes what he has said, buries his face in his hands]

Jimmy Carr: Stephen, ten points now if you know her name.

Sue Perkins: Is this the warm, personal touch that you get when you come to this show?

Stephen Fry: [bright red] I'm so ashamed! Oh Sue, I'm sorry.

Alan Davies: No-one noticed, Hugh.

Jimmy Carr: I think it's a trick question. Because you're a vegetarian. You wouldn't bite me, I don't think. You'd have a salad.

Alan Davies: I wouldn't consume you, but I would be prepared to kill you. Turn you into one of me.

Jimmy Carr: What, we'll all live in windmills and solve crime?

Alan Davies: I look like the character.

Stephen Fry: You do, actually.

Alan Davies: I'm not actually...

Jimmy Carr: Their defence is to dazzle? Tada!

Sue Perkins: It’s the John Barrowman of the deep sea...

Alan Davies: Stand back or I’ll show you my teeth!

Stephen Fry: Where does the saying 'saved by the bell' come from?

Jack Dee: [hits his buzzer, then grimaces] Oh no, I know what's gonna happen now. It's gonna be, I'm gonna get the klaxon for this. Is it boxing? Is it a boxing reference?

Stephen Fry: Yes!

Jack Dee: Oh.

Alan Davies: Is it - is this where the bells gonna go off…

Sue Perkins: [whispering] Don't do it!

Alan Davies: ...Is it going back to being buried alive?

[The forfeit klaxon goes off - BURIED ALIVE]

Jimmy Carr: How can you get it wrong after he's got it right?

Episode G.14 "Greeks"

[On the legend of Romans vomiting in order to be able to carry on eating]

Alan Davies: People definitely did that in pubs when I was growing up.

Stephen Fry: They threw up in order to drink more?

Alan Davies: Yeah. Go outside, be sick on the pavement, shake their heads, go straight back to the bar.

Phill Jupitus: Oh yeah, the tactical chunder. Totally.

Alan Davies: Yeah. "I feel terrible. I'm gonna have to go and have a tactical chunder." Come back five minutes later: "I'm fine now!"

Stephen Fry: Hmm. Makes sense.

Alan Davies: Makes sense. Four quids worth of bitter in the gutter and carry on.

Stephen Fry: We only call ourselves 'Quite Interesting', we don't call ourselves 'Astonishing'.

[Giving the scores]

Stephen Fry: We should do this the Athenian way. We should offer Alan the chance - because I can say that Alan is coming last…

Alan Davies: It's one of my best features.

Episode G.15 "Green"

[Why are people who don't eat meat called 'vegetarians'?]

Jeremy Clarkson: So we can identify them as fools and madmen.

[...]

Jeremy Clarkson: It's because if you said you had a herbivore coming round for dinner, the children would be frightened.

Jeremy Clarkson: How do you get wheat to mate?

Stephen Fry: Pollination.

Jeremy Clarkson: Yes, well, how does that happen?

Bill Bailey: You turn down the lights…

Alan Davies: Ask the barley to leave the room...

Stephen Fry: What's a Manhattan?

Bill Bailey: Red Bull. Red Bull and Egg nog.

Episode G.16 "Geometry"

[on why the columns of the Parthenon look straight]

Stephen Fry: They look straight cause they are straight.

Johnny Vegas: That's not a question! Why does this man look thin? Because he is. That is taking me on whole circle. My train of thought was: They look like this because they are. This is why I struggled in school.

Stephen Fry: It's the Q in QI...

Johnny Vegas: If a train travels at forty miles an hour and leaves at nine o'clock and arrives in Glasgow in twelve o'clock, how did it get there? And you're goin': 'Cause it did.

Stephen Fry: It's sort of that...

Johnny Vegas: It's not sort of that, its very confusing!

Stephen Fry: It's the Q in QI. Its going round in a circle but with a little wriggly bit at the end.

Johnny Vegas: Why does that look straight [holds up his notebook with a wriggly line drawn on.] Because it's not. That would have been a question. [Draws a straight line next to it] Why does that look straight? Because it is!

Stephen Fry: Sometimes...

Johnny Vegas: Because it is!

Stephen Fry: Sometimes things look...

Johnny Vegas: It’s straight!

Rob Brydon: I give you one theory and you look at me like I’m an ass!

Stephen Fry: I was just, I can’t...

Rob Brydon: No, you’ve done this before on this show!

[Rob gives a very thorough biography of Elvis.]

David Mitchell: Is this radio...?

Rob Brydon: I haven’t said anything for a while.

Stephen Fry: Date of death?

Rob Brydon: August 16th, 1977.

David Mitchell: It’s like Radio 2 in the middle of the night!

Rob Brydon: You look backwards, because history teaches us the future. Because from history, we learn patterns, and as Dr Phil says time and time again, the greatest indicator of future behaviour is past behaviour.

Johnny Vegas: [Putting a hand on Rob’s shoulder.] When are you gonna realise he’s not interested?

Stephen Fry: I’m so...

Rob Brydon: He is interested. [To Stephen.] Tell him you’re interested.

Stephen Fry: I’m very interested.

Stephen Fry: There is this strange thing called libration, which is like vibration but beginning with an L. It was a thing that was noted by quite a few of the early astronomers...

Rob Brydon: Can I say, sorry Stephen, but that's not an acceptable way of defining a word: Libration. It's like vibration, but beginning with an L.

Series H

Episode H.01 "Hodge Podge"

[while testing their buzzers]

Stephen Fry: And Alan goes:

Alan Davies: [presses buzzer]

[forfeit klaxon goes off - MINUS 10]

Stephen Fry: I'm sorry. I'm so, so not sorry...

Stephen Fry: What starts with H means that you'll always be the bridesmaid and never the bride?

Phill Jupitus: Hepatitis C.

Stephen Fry: Oddly enough, you’re surprisingly close.

Phill Jupitus: Herpes.

Stephen Fry: And what do they mean by monkey glands?

Phill Jupitus: The glands... of a monkey!

[Stephen has a genuine periscope rifle under his desk. Alan reaches for it.]

Stephen Fry: Now, don't play with it. They did ask that no-one else touches it.

Alan Davies: [defiantly] Oh?

Stephen Fry: It's very valuable.

Alan Davies: I was gonna make it go over the desk! [gives in and crawls back to his chair] I can't believe I'm not allowed to play with it.

Stephen Fry: I'm afraid I was given specific 'Alan not to touch' instructions.

Ross Noble: I love the fact that somewhere there's a memo that just says: "Machine gun - for Stephen Fry's use only".

Ross Noble: A circular triangle?

Stephen Fry: Well...

Phil Jupitus: Oh, no, no, no. This is your first time. This sort of thing happens all the time. “It’s a sort of circular triangle.”

Alan Davies: “And it makes a square.”

Ross Noble: It’s not the fact that I’m boggled by that, it’s the fact that I now realise there’s a possibility that you could have a Toblerone-Rolo combo.

[About 7 minutes after the gun conversation.]

Alan Davies: Let me play with the gun! I wanna play with the gun that shoots around corners.

Stephen Fry: No, you can’t play with the gun.

Alan Davies: [Grumpy.] “Special instructions ‘don’t let Alan...’”

Phill Jupitus: “Police were baffled in London tonight by a series of murders committed around corners.”

Episode H.02 "H-Anatomy"

["Where is the best place to have your skull drilled?"]

Alan Davies: [saying nothing, places his fingers on top of his head]

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - JUST HERE]

Alan Davies: Is that the way they can now read my mind, these people?

Stephen Fry: [laughing] It's amazing, isn't it.

Alan Davies: It's the eighth series, I suppose.

Episode H.03 "Hoaxes"

[On whether the moon landings were a hoax]

Alan Davies: I did an advert with Patrick Moore, and I said: "So, Patrick, did they land on the moon?" And he looked so annoyed with me. He actually explained to me how he'd help to map the moon for NASA and how he'd spent years in the project, and the landing site was partly his idea… And if I ever spoke to him again, he was gonna be sick in my eyes.

David Mitchell: We are in trouble as a species if people will refuse to believe in things they couldn't actually do themselves.

Alan Davies: [to cautious David] Embrace the klaxon!

David Mitchell: I'm trying to!

Episode H.04 "Humans"

Stephen Fry: What is the point of teenagers?

Jo Brand: Are they the only group you are legally allowed to punch?

Stephen Fry: My favourite on the Weakest Link was "What are Chardonnay, Shiraz and Pino Noir?" And the guy said "Footballer's wives."

Alan Davies: My favourite one was: "Name a dangerous race". And the man said "The Arabs."

[About footprints in Australia proving indigenous Aborigines were capable of running very fast.]

Stephen Fry: You can tell from the strides that they ran really fast.

Jack Dee: What were they running from?

Alan Davies: The white man.

Stephen Fry: I leave you with this thought about being human and being happy. If you really want to be happy all you have to do is say I am beautiful. So I want you all tonight to go and look at the mirror and say “Stephen Fry is beautiful.” Goodnight.

Episode H.05 "H-Animals"

[As the panel is discussing horns, there are pictures of several horned animals on the screens]

Ruby Wax: [to Ross Noble] Are you speaking English?

Stephen Fry: …Did you just say to him: "Are you speaking English?" Have you never heard a Geordie accent before?

Ruby Wax: Not coming from something with hair that's never been combed.

Ross Noble: I'd just point out that I'm actually part of this show. I'm not on the screen.

[On swimming with dolphins]

Ross Noble: If you see proper wild dolphins, they've got lumps out of them, and bits missing, and they fight… I just love the idea that people are just going: "Oh, this amazing experience"…

Stephen Fry: …Those serene and mystical and lyrical…

Ross Noble: …When actually it's just like being chucked in with a bunch of wet skinheads.

Stephen Fry: It's not often I find myself in a group of four people, thinking I'm the most normal, sane and balanced person, but I'm happy to feel that today.

Stephen Fry: What is the most aggressive animal?

Ruby Wax: My mother.

Stephen Fry: The rhino’s not the least bit aggressive.

Sean Lock: Not a mammal, either.

Stephen Fry: A rhino is a mammal, yes.

Sean Lock: Is it? I thought it was a dinosaur.

[The audience laughs.]

Sean Lock: Why’s is called a rhinosaurus then, if it’s not a dinosaur?

Stephen Fry: Because it’s...not.

Sean Lock: What do you mean ‘because it’s not’? It’s called a rhinosaurus. That’s what dinosaurs are called.

Ross Noble: It’s a noceros, isn’t it?

Stephen Fry: Rhinoceros.

Ross Noble: Rhinoceros. Have you been calling it a rhinosaurus?

Sean Lock: Yeah.

Stephen Fry: There’s a problem.

Ross Noble: I might be an idiot, but I’m an accurate idiot.

[Watching a video of a hagfish releasing slime.]

Ross Noble: I think my baby daughter might be a hagfish. Cos that’s nothing. To be honest with you, I’ve got that on my trousers every morning.

Episode H.06 "Happiness"

Stephen Fry: And someone who doesn’t even know the meaning of the word lugubrious, Alan Davies.

Alan Davies: That’s true.

[On what would make Britain happy]

Alan Davies: Give everyone the mental age of six.

Andy Hamilton: Well, the media are working on that, aren't they?

[Applause sets off the "Pleasure Gauge"]

Rich Hall: It's like a headline I saw in Ireland, said "Cork man drowns".

[Applause pushes the needle of the "Pleasure Gauge" into the red]

Stephen Fry: You guys are really bending the needle.

Rich Hall: His name was Bob. [to the audience] Come on!

[Applause sets off the "Pleasure Gauge" again]

Rich Hall: I think I've won this. I'm not gonna answer another question.

Stephen Fry: But how many friends do you have?

Rich Hall: Just one. James Taylor.

Rich Hall: They say that a friend will help you, uhh, a friend will come over to your house and help you move, and a good friend will help you move a body.

Stephen Fry: That's good. That's...

Rich Hall: ...I have two good friends.

[On the Dunbar number and how many friends people have on average on Facebook]

Phill Jupitus: I feel quite bad for the Amish in the situation. cause they are not gonna meet people on facebook, are they? Unless we create an Amish facebook where you just write everything you know about yourself on a sheet of paper and put it in a barrel in the middle of the village. People just dip in and out of, you know. "Raised a barn today. LOL""Drank some cider ROFL"

Stephen Fry: And they have AMG: "Ach mein Gott!"

Andy Hamilton: How else do you meet if you’re not on a dating site, though?

Alan Davies: Join a group.

Andy Hamilton: Join a group?

Stephen Fry: Yeah.

Alan Davies: Yeah, you join a Facebook group with like minded people.

Andy Hamilton: Oh, right.

Alan Davies: They send you witty remarks. Eventually, you send them a photograph of your genitals.

Alan Davies: Have we killed anyone on this show?

Stephen Fry: I...

Alan Davies: We must try harder.

Episode H.07 "Horrible"

[Describing the home of a tongue-eating louse, trying to guide the panellists towards the right answer]

Stephen Fry: It is a sliding organ, a wet organ, that is…

Alan Davies: What are you looking at me for?

Sean Lock: I know a fact about tapeworms. Eight percent of people in this country have tapeworms, which makes them more popular than dogs.

Stephen Fry: It buries itself in the ground in the summer in that state and kind of sleeps and there are points at stake for those who can tell me what the summer version of hibernating is. Hibernating is from hiber...

Sean Lock: Lowbernating.

Dara Ó Briain: I gonna have go to them to get them to talk and I was in Liverpool at The Strip, I start with dreams about the occasion of having a dream about a famous person and some bloke in the crowd shared with us that he had a dream about Kate Winslet. And I said "Oh!" and I said "Was it a sexy dream?" and he said "No, she turned me down" [general laughter] In his own head! And I said to him "Were you disappointed?" and he said "Naw, I didn't hit her with my best stuff".

Stephen Fry: That's very strange.

Alan Davies: I had a dream about Kate Winslet and in my dream it didn't turn out well either.

Dara Ó Briain: Wow, she's like the Freddie Krueger of teases.

Sean Lock: I imagine seriously violent criminals are quite good at sex.

Stephen Fry: Are they?

Sean Lock: I don’t know, I’m just guessing.

Alan Davies: Tomatoes.

Stephen Fry: Tomatoes is the right answer.

Alan Davies: 50 points!

Stephen Fry: Yeah... maybe. Some points.

Episode H.08 "Hypothetical"

[The producer and creator of QI, John Lloyd, is in the panel and has been introduced last]

Alan Davies: You normally introduce me last. It slightly caught me out, and I was applauding myself.

Stephen Fry: Oh, bless.

Alan Davies: And I was applauding myself insincerely.

[On weighing heads by dunking them in water buckets]

Johnny Vegas: What if you got an air pocket in your ears?

Stephen Fry: A pocket?

Johnny Vegas: You know, the ear pockets. [puts his fingers in his ears]

Stephen Fry: Yes, but the ear cavities are cancelled out...

Sandi Toksvig: [reaches for Johnny's arm] Take your fingers out, you won't hear the answer.

Sandi Toksvig: Do you know my grandfather had two glass eyes and yet he could see, so he, erm, what happened was, very sad, he lost one eye. He wasn't careless he was ill. And he had a glass eye made that was exactly like his other perfectly working blue Scandinavian eye and then he had one made that was blood shot, and it was known as Granddads Party Eye. And he kept it in a box on a mantelpiece. And when he was going out for the evening, he'd take out the false blue one and put in the blood shot one and he said "I'm going out now and I shan't be back till they match."

[The Quickfire Hypothetical Round has been dragging on for a while]

Sandi Toksvig: If a Quickfire Hypothetical Round takes a really long time, is it still a quickfire...

Sandi Toksvig: There's a wonderful story about a famous ocean liner captain, and he had a little silver box that he kept in his pocket. And every time before they came into port he'd take out the silver box and look into it. After many years service he finally died and his second in command said "Lets have a look in that silver box". And they opened the box and it said "Port: Left. Starboard: Right."

Sandi Toksvig: I don't like cats very much...

Stephen Fry: Awww...

Sandi Toksvig: No, I'm sorry. So many cats, so few recipes.

Sandi Toksvig: A chicken and an egg are lying in bed enjoying a post-coital cigarette. And the chicken turns to the egg and says, "Well, I think we've just answered that question".

Alan Davies: What an unusual serial killer that was. If only they had CSI Vienna.

Episode H.09 "House and Home"

Stephen Fry: The ecological footprint is a measure of the amount of land needed to regenerate consumed resources and deal with the resultant waste, and current figures calculated by the United Nations are that we are using up 1.4 times more than the planet can restore.

Alan Davies: The thing is… we evolved from this planet, we are of this planet, we live on this planet, so… can't we do what we like?

Stephen Fry: Yep… absolutely.

Alan Davies: I mean we are victims of our own evolution; I just happened to have come in at this point and now I have to turn the lights out and can't see where I'm going when I go to bed.

Stephen Fry: It has never been illegal to own a slave in England until April 2010. [To Alan] I'm saying I could have had you, as a slave, legally.

Alan Davies: You mean, this series, I'm finally free?

Episode ‪H.10 "Health and Safety"‬

Stephen Fry: [To David Mitchell] Once again, your relentless, urgent, slightly worried logic is making this nonsense.

[On hypochondria]

Jeremy Clarkson: I've got a twisted testicle, a hideous skin disease, two slipped disks...

Alan Davies: [singing] …And a partridge in a pear tree!

Stephen Fry: Why might I put my finger up your bottom if you couldn't name of seven bald men apart from Yul Brynner? [Beat] That is one of the oddest questions I've ever asked anybody.

Episode H.11 "Highs and Lows"

Fred MacAulay: There will be a lot of people watching who will wonder what does a true Scotsman wear under his kilt, and I can tell you true Scotsman will never tell you what he wears under his kilt. He will show you at the drop of a hat.

Stephen Fry: I've seen dandruff on the shoes. That's a giveaway. But the short kilt -

Sandi Toksvig: I don't feel well now.

Alan Davies: [waving arms] I don't feel good with that information. Quick, send something else! Give me another image!

[On field crickets chirping quicker at hotter temperatures]

Rob Brydon: Well, it makes sense now, when you think about when you're being in a hot country, and you're tossing at night and you can't get off, and then you hear the…

Alan Davies: [long look]

Rob Brydon: No! No, no, no.

Stephen Fry: [sympathetic look]

Rob Brydon: I'm simply not having it!

Sandi Toksvig: Sounds like it.

Episode H.12 "Horses and Hunting"

Stephen Fry: A million British horses were sent to the First World War front. What happened to the ones that survived?

Alan Davies: They settled in the southern France, opened a caravan park…

Jimmy Carr: Of course they couldn't learn the language, so they ended up moving back.

Dara Ó Briain: No one has ever fallen on a banana peel. No one’s slid on a banana peel... Presumably the only person...

[Alan puts up his hand.]

Dara Ó Briain: You? You’re kidding. The one person in history.

Jimmy Carr: That is a commitment to comedy, Alan. Well done.

Stephen Fry: Was this in comedy school, or once you’d graduated?

Alan Davies: No, it was in Chapel Market in Islington. It’s a fruit and veg market.

Stephen Fry: That’s a likely place to find one.

Alan Davies: I did actually tread on a banana. And you really go. I mean, they are incredible.

Jimmy Carr: There was a little girl in our primary school class, we were like 6 years old, and she was just in floods of tears. Bawling her eyes out. And we kind of went, ‘what’s the matter?’ She went, ‘I just love horses so much!’

Clare Balding: I don’t see why that’s strange.

Episode H.13 "Holidays"

[On how to find your way towards north in a forest]

Rich Hall: You find a tree.

Stephen Fry: Yeah?

Rich Hall: With moss on it. And…

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - MOSS]

Rich Hall: [unaffected] …On the opposite side of it, it's dry, so you sit there and wait for someone to come along and ask them.

Rob Brydon: I wore trousers very much like that. With the long sock, of course.

Stephen Fry: We know about your long socks.

Rob Brydon: Don’t we just?

Rich Hall: [Taking off his lei.] Can I take this off? I’m getting a rash,

Stephen Fry: Okay.

Rich Hall: I’m allergic to souvenirs.

Episode H.14 "Hocus Pocus" (Christmas Special)

Stephen Fry: What's the oldest trick in the book?

Lee Mack: Debbie McGee.

Daniel Radcliffe: The oldest trick in the book is pulling the head off a dead goose and then restoring it.

Lee Mack: I can do the first half of that trick.

[Daniel Radcliffe has given several correct and comprehensive answers. Alan is starting to look miserable.]

Stephen Fry: Don't be put off by a young person knowing more than you, Alan. You must be used to it by now.

Stephen Fry: Graham, would you like to read your joke?

Graham Norton: Okay, here we go. (He reads the joke and then looks up at Stephen.) Did you write this?

Stephen Fry: Are they good?

Graham Norton: It just sounds like something you might write. Knock knock.

Stephen Fry: Who’s there?

Graham Norton: To.

Stephen Fry: To who.

Graham Norton: To whom, surely.

Episode H.15 "Hypnotism, Hallucinations and Hysteria"

[Stephen has hypnotized a lobster]

Ronni Ancona: You truly are a renaissance man!

Stephen Fry: I wear tights, put it that way.

[On the sunset being in effect a mirage, to the general confusion of the panellists]

Phill Jupitus: I...hate...this...show.

Stephen Fry: Oh Phill, be interested, please.

Phill Jupitus: The sun...is there! But you're going: [deep voice] No. But it's there. Not there. Miraaage.

[Later, Alan has expounded on sunstrikes [1] in New Zealand]

Phill Jupitus: And I'm sure the drivers in New Zealand, as they see the sun setting, will be reassured to know that it's [deep voice] not there.

Stephen Fry: What shape is this staircase? [Phill hits his buzzer.] Yes, Phill?

Phill Jupitus: It’s not there!

Episode H.16 "History"

[What is a "Henge"?]

Sandi Toksvig: Is it a very old form of economic investment? It's a henge fund.

[The panellists are given old bronze bowls with small hole in the middle, and asked what they would do with them]

Rob Brydon: You know what I would use this for, Stephen? If I was enjoying some salted pistachio nuts at home, while watching the Emmerdale omnibus, I would use this to…

Stephen Fry and Alan Davies: …Kill yourself?

[On why Snakes on a Plane got produced.]

Rob Brydon: Because people had more money than sense?

Stephen Fry: So, with that display of general incompetence, we reach the end of recorded history. All that remains to see is who has learned its lessons, and who's condemned to repeat their mistakes endlessly…on Dave.

Sandi Toksvig: He can’t have been that ill though, cos he seems to have had time to change his socks.

Alan Davies: I’m dying. Get the death socks.

Rob Brydon: Stephen, can I point out? Can I give the seal of approval to his wonderfully long socks?

Stephen Fry: Rob long socks. Oh dear.

Series I

Episode I.01 "I-Spy"

[On the aye-aye]

Lee Mack: I'm not surprised that they're endangered, because clearly they aren't mating, are they? They're looking at each other and going: "I'd rather not!"

Stephen Fry: It is dark, remember.

Alan Davies: All the ugly ones come out in the dark.

Lee Mack: That's how Jimmy mates. "I'm happy to do it, luv, but it'll have to be with the lights off."

Jimmy Carr: I can't believe your wife told you that.

Stephen Fry: Do you know how they separate the men from the boys in the Navy? With a crowbar.

Stephen Fry: Who finished off Russia’s greatest love machine?

Lee Mack: Boney M.

Episode I.02 "International"

[On the I series "Nobody knows" bonus]

Bill Bailey: What are the points that you gain by using it correctly?

Stephen Fry: I think we all agree that nobody in this universe understands QI's scoring system.

Bill Bailey: Right. So, by that logic, were we to raise the subject of the scoring system, and I was to do that, [holds up his "Nobody knows" card] then… [he's cut off by laughter and applause]

Alan Davies: He's made a very good point.

Stephen Fry: I suppose I'm trapped in an infinite loop. Yes, fortunately that isn't one of the questions.

David Mitchell: If it were in a hypothetical round a question - "What is the QI scoring system?" - and then "Nobody knows", [mimics lifting up the card] what would happen to the person who does the QI scoring? Would they not then feel rather sad? They are at least presumably sitting there thinking that they know.

David Mitchell: I think they reserve a lot of their creativity for this show, don’t they?

Alan Davies: I wonder what the score is now.

Stephen Fry: Yes, the score now... [He consults his screen.] Amazingly, Bill has three and everyone else has zero.

David Mitchell: Why three?! I’d have thought one, or ten. But three?! How would you divide your contribution by three?

Bill Bailey: [Pointing at each of the other panellists.] Better than you, better than you, better than you. Three.

Stephen Fry: When was the First World War first named as such?

Bill Bailey: Um, at the outbreak. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.

Stephen Fry: You think they called it the first world war straight away?

Bill Bailey: Before it started, yeah.

David Mitchell: It would be an act of a pessimist to call it the first world war that early, surely. It's gonna be some point after 1939, isn't it?

Bill Bailey: A realist, surely.

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - 1939]

David Mitchell: Excuse me! I think I said - I think what I said, people in the box, is after 1939. Which may contain 1939, but does not mean it.

Stephen Fry: No. Well -

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR]

David Mitchell: [waving finger] Okay! No, no, no! "After 1939" and "after the Second World War" are not synonymous. Now, this is just giving you time to type "after 1939".

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR]

David Mitchell: Why don't you just type "MITCHELL IS A COCK"?

Stephen Fry: [warningly] I wouldn't put it past them...

Episode I.03 "Imbroglio"

[while testing their buzzers]

Stephen Fry: And Alan goes:

Alan Davies: [presses buzzer]

[forfeit klaxon goes off - WRONG AGAIN!]

[On French phrases that the French themselves don't use]

John Bishop: What about bidet?

Stephen Fry: Bidet they do indeed have, though it's easier, really, to do a handstand in the shower, to be honest. But if you want the expense of a bidet…

Sean Lock: Easier?

Stephen Fry: [laughing] If you are as nimble as I am.

Sean Lock: I'd pay good money to see that. I'd like to see you doing that, with a camera, [mimics lifting a camera phone] going: "Tweet this!"

Frank Skinner: I tell you what's always frustrated me, and that is that on a standard typewriter keyboard, when you hit the semicolon, you just have to hit the key. But to get the colon, you have to press that other key. If I was a colon, I'd think: "Surely I take precedence. You are merely a semi version of me! I should be the one that just needs one key!"

Stephen Fry: Does anyone know, in a packet of mixed nuts, why do the Brazils always rise to the top?

Alan: [Laughing disbelievingly.] Surely nobody knows that.

Stephen Fry: You’re right!

Stephen Fry: Well, it's just becoming rapidly more clear: there are many people on Earth who need to be killed and nearly all of them are management consultants.

Episode I.04 "Indecision"

[On the con game Find The Lady or Three Card Monte]

Jimmy Carr: I prefer Three Card Monte, because Find the Lady...I had a really bad experience in Thailand once...

Stephen Fry: Did you feel a bit of a dick?

[On answering a question about how you tell whether a chick is male or female]

Stephen Fry: This is something I vaguely knew about growing up in Norfolk, because in Norfolk there is a community of Vietnamese turkey sexers who... (He is cut off by the audience laughing)

Phill Jupitus: I can NEVER watch Platoon again! You've ruined Apocalypse Now for me!

Stephen Fry: I'm sorry about that...

Phill Jupitus: (Putting two fingers to his temple, imitating a gun and speaking in an Asian accent) WHAT SEX IS CHICKEN?!?! YOU TELL ME NOW!!!

Stephen Fry: What big decision did the driver of the number 78 bus have to make in December 1952.

[Jimmy hits his buzzer.]

Jimmy Carr: The coronation is all I know about ‘52. The Queen didn’t get the bus, did she?

Stephen Fry: No, she didn’t.

Episode I.05 "Invertebrates"

Sarah Millican: My dad once punched a bee.

Stephen Fry: Why aren’t there any vegan Venus Flytraps?

Sarah Millican: Maybe there are, but people don’t invite them round for dinner cos it’s too complicated.

Stephen Fry: Would you like to see a shrimp on a running machine?

Jimmy Carr: More than you know!

Alan Davies: I’ve tried a scorpion, I’ve tried an ant. That’s it.

Sarah Millican: I’ve got a rule, like, if it comes in my house, then I’m allowed to kill it.

Stephen Fry: Right.

Sarah Millican: For trespassing.

Stephen Fry: So how many Jehova’s Witnesses...?

Episode I.06 "Inventive"

Sean Lock: I hear voices.

Stephen Fry: Do you?

Sean Lock: But I ignore them and I just carry on killing.

Episode I.07 "Incomprehensible"

[On meaning in animal noises]

Brian Cox: I can vouch for that. There are people who study this. My director of one of my documentaries, he got a PhD from Oxford studying frog communication.

Stephen Fry: He was a Professor of French.

Stephen Fry: He genuinely believed it was possible that after Christ's ascension into Heaven, the rings of Saturn are where he put his foreskin. Now, you're maybe thinking that I'm trying to mock the church, that this is nonsense. But Christ, of course, was a Jewish boy, and like all Jewish boys, at the eighth day of his birth, he was circumc –

Brian Cox: They're fifty thousand miles across!

Stephen Fry: She also actively sought out degrading experiences. She once drank a cupful of cancerous pus from a woman who'd abused her.

Alan Davies: But had she appeared on Mock the Week?

[Question: "How were the rings around Saturn actually formed?" Brian Cox and Alan Davies, sitting on the opposite sides of the studio, both pull out their "Nobody knows" cards]

Brian Cox: I'm going to, to play the card there.

Stephen Fry: [looking at Cox] You are right! You're a true scientist. The fact is that nobody does really know, do they.

Alan Davies: [pointed cough]

Stephen Fry: [turns to see Alan with his card] Well done!

Alan Davies: [Formally] Thank you.

[On Time's arrow]

Sue Perkins: All you need is an analogy that’s pertinent to you, so in my case: All relationships. And then you realize: Perfect eighteen month, and then they're dead.

Stephen Fry: The second law of sexual dynamics.

Sue Perkins: Yeah, according to me, that's how I extrapolate.

Brian Cox: To make that statistically significant though, you'd have to have an awful lot of relationships.

Sue Perkins: Oh, I do.

Stephen Fry: Not on Earth, but in our solar system. I'm thinking of Neptune or Uranus.

Audience: [tittering]

Stephen Fry: [looking sternly into the camera] No. No. No. No.

Ross Noble: Of all these [Saturn's] moons, which one is most likely to be the home to Ewoks?

Brian Cox: Would be, um, Titan.

Ross Noble: Titan?

Brian Cox: It's got a thicker atmosphere than the Earth, so you'd need to be furry.

[Ross and Alan quickly open their notebooks and start writing]

["Fill in the gaps in slogans"]

Stephen Fry: "Welcome to Northamptonshire - Let yourself..."

Sue Perkins: "…down."

Stephen Fry: This is an optimistic one here. "Welcome to Tower Hamlets - Let's make it..."

Alan Davies: "…out alive."

[After it turned out the actual slogan is: "Welcome to Tower Hamlets - Let's make it happen."]

Ross Noble: There was another slogan, it said: It did happen on Friday the 17th. If you've witnessed it...

[Talking about SatNav]

Stephen Fry: I've just done voice for them, so that if you have TomTom or Garmin…

Ross Noble: No, you drive along, and it goes: "Turn left. Now, the interesting thing about this particular building…" [His voice is drowned under the audience's laughter and applause. Stephen buries his face in his hands.]

Alan Davies: Did you do it as if you were talking to me? That's the worrying thing. "Left, you moron!"

Ross Noble: I have the key to the city of Port Pirie, in Australia.

Stephen Fry: Do you?

Ross Noble: I was doing a gig, and I was talking to a bloke, turned out he was the mayor. So I went, ‘can I have the key to the city?’ and he went, ‘yeah, alright then.’ So I said, ‘alright then,’ I didn’t want him to back out, I said, ‘where’s your office?’ He says, ‘on the High Street.’ ‘I’ll be down there tomorrow.’ So I turned up, he’d got a shed key and a ribbon and went, ‘there you go.’

Ross Noble: I had a sat-nav, after Port Pirie, and the Nullarbor Plain in Australia, big long…

Stephen Fry: Between Adelaide and Perth.

Ross Noble: Yeah. The longest straight road in the world. And I turned it on and it said, “Drive forward for two days.” And the next bit went, “then turn left.” But the thing was… But the stupid thing was, it was such a long road, I missed the left hand turn!

Episode I.08 "Inequality"

Stephen Fry: This is a show in which nothing will be fair, from top to bottom, so let’s get it over with and go straight to the scores. In first place, with minus 54, it’s Sandi Toksvig. In second place, with plus 7, it’s Clive Anderson. In third place with minus sechzig (60) is Henning Wehn. And lastly, obviously, with minus 1 gazillion, is Alan Davies.

[Looking at a painting on the screen]

Alan Davies: That's a really ugly baby.

Clive Anderson: That's not any use! Don't learn that expression. "Really ugly baby." There's never an option to use that in real life.

[Explaining a radio interview of an actress]

Alan Davies: Cut the long story short, they airbrushed her nipples out of the poster. Her nipples were showing through her costume, just the two little… [motions with his hands]

Clive Anderson: But this is radio!

Alan Davies: [laughing] Not just for the radio. And, uh, she had complained about it. "So why have you airbrushed my nipples, that's ridiculous. Why don't you just leave them?" And the presenter said: "Well, perhaps they thought they weren't suitable for children".

[On corporal punishment]

Stephen Fry: Children were always beaten. Really, we are the first generation - Um, I'm not. I was beaten huge about when I was a child in prep school.

Clive Anderson: Really?

Stephen Fry: God, yes. From age seven 'til thirteen, at least twice a week. I was a bad boy, and I was always being thrashed.

Clive Anderson: What for?

Stephen Fry: Oh, stealing, lying, cheating, um, being cheeky, being a nuisance, evading games…

Clive Anderson: Bit of a smartarse, were you?

Stephen Fry: Yeah, being a smartarse...

Clive Anderson: ...being too clever for your own good. That sort of thing. Always telling everyone what was going on.

Stephen Fry: All things that annoyed people about...

Clive Anderson: Well, they certainly beat that out of you, didn't they?

Henning Wehn: If you're in your seventies now, how old were you in the end of World War II? Maybe ten years old? How did you help win the war? When you were just ten years old, you did not help win the war.

Stephen Fry: By not eating bananas.

Henning Wehn: Yeah. You were nothing but a drain on British resources!

Stephen Fry: [to the laughing panelists] You've gotta admire his guts, haven't you?

Henning Wehn: Effectively every 70-year-old Brit, effectively fought on the side of Nazi Germany! And lost the war every little bit as much as we did!

Episode I.09 "Illness"

Ben Goldacre: Female sexual dysfunction, for example, started being pushed at the time that various companies were trying to get licences for things like Viagra for the 50% of the population who are unlucky enough not to have a penis. And...

Stephen Fry: [to Jo Brand] Steady.

Alan Davies: Jo's got loads of penises, but they're all in her drawer.

[On flatulence]

Stephen Fry: It seems that we produce about three pints of wind a day.

Jo Brand: Pints?

Stephen Fry: Yes, it's measured in pints. Released in ten to fifteen individual "episodes".

Andy Hamilton: You can get the box set as well.

Alan Davies: Or, you can have a feature-length episode.

Stephen Fry: Why shouldn’t you sleep with a dog?

Andy Hamilton: He won’t respect you in the morning.

Episode I.10 "Inland Revenue"

Sandi Toksvig: I once bought a racehorse by mistake.

Dara Ó Briain: What had you originally gone into the shop for?

[On fire stations]

Stephen Fry: You've gotta have two machines abreast, is usual, isn't it? And then all the living quarters were next door... [interrupted by a chuckle from Alan]

Alan Davies: Sorry, I've just thought of breasts. [hands on his chest] "Two machines"?

Stephen Fry: [laughing] Two machines per breast.

Sandi Toksvig: It was an odd moment, Alan, 'cos I was with you.

[Dara is given back points unfairly deducted from him in an earlier episode]

Sandi Toksvig: Sorry, is he gonna get points for something - and we weren't even there!

Al Murray: I know a loads of stuff I haven't said!

Dara Ó Briain: I'm okay, 'cos I came on series two, and I mentioned the triple point of water being zero. And in series three I came back, and they said: "Oh no, we've had e-mails, that actually the temperature is 0.01." Right, so I was one hundredth of a degree off on this. And he docked me points! The following year! So I'm happy, I'll take them.

Stephen Fry: Yes, exactly. What goes around, comes around. [to the other panelists] Don't feel bad. You may get points, next… two years time.

Dara Ó Briain: Some day when you least expect it, when you're sitting and having coffee, Stephen will appear and go: [bows] "Some points".

Episode I.11 "Infantile"

Alan Davies: Once you’ve got a baby, food on the floor really is fair game. If you didn’t eat food off the floor, you’re wasting about 90 quid a week.

Episode I.12 "Illumination"

Stephen Fry: Why don’t moths come out during the day if they’re so fond of the bloody light?

Chris Addison: You know, Edison electrocuted an elephant. It's my favourite fact of all time.

Stephen Fry: Yes. Do you know why?

Chris Addison: He was carrying out an execution.

Alan Davies: I think you might know this 'cos you saw it on QI.

Stephen Fry: [laughing] Yes.

Chris Addison: Really? [over the audience laughter] The problem of joining you people so late is that you've basically covered all human knowledge!

Stephen Fry: Tell me something quite interesting about the original geishas.

Jack Dee: They were all men.

Stephen Fry: Yes!

Jack Dee: Oh, God.

Stephen Fry: The first person to reason that the tropics were not hotter because they're nearer the sun, but because a smaller area is lit by an equal amount of light compared to other latitudes, was George Best. [to the incredulous amusement of the panelists] It's absolutely true! It was George Best who worked that out.

Chris Addison: Oh, you've lost it now. You've completely lost it. You're gonna have to hand this over to someone else.

[Turns out Stephen was talking about an Elizabethan scientist, not the footballer]

Stephen Fry: My next question is this; why can’t blindfolded people walk in a straight line?

Alan Davies: Can’t see where they’re going. Next question.

Episode I.13 "Intelligence"

David Mitchell: They do seem like the most evil of birds, don’t they?

Stephen Fry: They’re often considered creatures of ill omen, aren’t they? In Shakespeare they’re often used as a symbol.

Phill Jupitus: Yeah, but that’s because you’re just seeing them with Carmina Burana playing.

David Mitchell: Do you think I should get something else on my iPod?

Phill Jupitus: Tijuana Taxi by Herb Alpert. [Hums the song.] You see, that’s a nice crow. Put a sombrero on it, take the edge off it.

David Mitchell: Yeah, but even if you had Carmina Burana and you were looking at a robin, you wouldn’t think the robin was evil, would you?

Phill Jupitus: I would.

David Mitchell: Would you?

Phill Jupitus: Yeah, dirty bastard robin.

Episode I.14 "Idleness"

Stephen Fry: Do you know the most commonly played word in Scrabble?

Jeremy Clarkson: Penis.

Stephen Fry: No.

Jeremy Clarkson: It is in my house.

Episode I.15 "Ice"

Alan Davies: So what do we have to pronounce?

Stephen Fry: Now, yes that’s what I was... how did you know that I was gonna ask that as a supplementary question?

Alan Davies: I thought you already did.

Stephen Fry: Oh, did I already say it?

Alan Davies: Either that, or I read it off the autocue.

Stephen Fry: You read it off the autocue! You great big cheater!

Stephen Fry: Why did the Spanish Duke of Alba order 7000 pairs of ice skates?

Sean Lock: Cos he was a millipede. Can’t see from that picture. Thousands of legs.

Stephen Fry: Any thoughts as to why he might have ordered 7000 pairs of ice skates?

Sean Lock: He wanted to wipe it out. “I hate ice skating. I’m gonna buy all the boots, and it’ll just die out.”

Stephen Fry: We’re talking the 17th century.

Sean Lock: That’s what I’d do.

Stephen Fry: [Trying to get back on track.] We’re talking the 17th century. The pope...

Sean Lock: I’d do it for showjumping though.

Stephen Fry: Right.

Sean Lock: I’d buy all the horses. And all those funny blocks that look like walls you’ve never seen before. Buy all those. And then showjumping would be finished forever.

Stephen Fry: So you think he was trying to wipe out ice skating as a sport?

Sean Lock: Yes. Yeah. It’d be a good James Bond plot, wouldn’t it? Instead of trying to take over the world, I’m trying to stop showjumping. James Bond’s gotta get me and kill me before...

Ross Noble: The trouble is though, you’ve got all them obstacles. You’ve got all them obstacles in your garden, and you’ve bought the horses. They’re gonna... it’s in their nature. They’re gonna be doing it in the garden. You’ll look out, be entertained...

Sean Lock: Hoisted by my own petard.

Episode I.16 "The Immortal Bard"

[After having quoted Hamlet]

Sue Perkins: And that will be the only quote, that's it, I've blown all my quotes.

Stephen Fry: After all, as you know, there is a tradition, is there not, the very saying of the word Macbeth in a theatre brings bad luck.

Sue Perkins: You have to sleep with all your co-stars immediately.

Stephen Fry: Is that what you were told?

[On The Lion King being based on Hamlet]

Sue Perkins: At what point does Hamlet say Hakuna matata?

[On Broadway musicals inspired by Shakespeare plays]

Stephen Fry: There was one based on The Comedy of Errors...

Sue Perkins: What happens in The Comedy of Errors?

Stephen Fry: There are two sets of identical twins...

Sue Perkins: [exasperated at Shakespeare's stock characters] Oh God, one of them's shipwrecked, "who's a girl, who's a boy?", "I'm married!", everyone's dead!

[On what the bill Ingram Fraser killed Christopher Marlowe over was for]

Stephen Fry: Might have been a prostitute, might have been a brothel.

Sue Perkins: So a brothel bill, then.

Bill Bailey: I didn't have that.

Sue Perkins: To be honest, the service charge in this is redundant.

Bill Bailey: I had one of them, two of them...

David Mitchell: I asked for that, but it never happened.

Stephen Fry: It was off.

Bill Bailey: If we all chip in...

Stephen Fry: Why don't we have a big one, and we all have a bit?

[...]

Stephen Fry: Anyway, what made Lord Byron limp?

Sue Perkins: That's a follow-up question.

Bill Bailey: Item four on the brothel bill...?

Series J

Episode J.01 "Jargon"

Victoria Coren: Last night, I had an anxiety dream about coming on this show, and in this dream, I think I was sitting on the other side and you were asking the question very sternly "Why was the March Hare so important to the Aztecs?" And I didn’t know the answer and I said "Did they worship it?" And the screens went "Worship it. Worship it." which was absolutely terrifying.

[Much later]

Stephen Fry: Anyway. [very sternly] Why was the March Hare so important to the Aztecs?

Alan Davies: [Egging Victoria on] Whatever you dreamt was the answer, is the right answer.

Victoria Coren: I know the answer isn’t "Did they worship it?", because...

[forfeit klaxon goes off - WORSHIP IT]

[ Bill Bailey has correctly identified a bird on the screens as a flycatcher.]

Stephen Fry: That was a flycatcher. It was a Juan Fernández Tit-Tyrant.

Alan Davies: Here we go again...

Bill Bailey: Wait a minute...[writing in his notebook] A Juan Fernández Tit-Tyrant.

Stephen Fry: There are points for knowing where the Juan Fernández islands are.

Victoria Coren: *scoffs* Breastcock Lane...?!

Stephen Fry: Who speaks in terms, harangues and declaims in a long meandering cascade of sounds, syllables, stresses and intonations, that might at first seem to be full of sense and meaning, but soon reveal itself to be an empty, vain, hollow and completely meaningless stream of gibberish?

Jimmy Carr: [To Stephen] You.

[forfeit klaxon goes off - YOU DO, STEPHEN]

Stephen Fry: We call our numbers Arabic numbers.

Alan Davies: Do we? I thought our numbers... okay.

Stephen Fry: Roman alphabet.

Alan Davies: Right.

Stephen Fry: And Arabic numerals.

Bill Bailey: And Gregorian chanting.

Jimmy Carr: Have you played hangman for money?

Victoria Coren: Yes.

Jimmy Carr: Who plays hangman for money?!

Stephen Fry: She bets on everything!

Victoria Coren: I was about to say I've done everything for money, but I know what you guys do with that.

Episode J.02 "Jam, Jelly and Juice"

Stephen Fry: So, what begins with J and appears to be alive?

Jo Brand: Is it me?

Stephen Fry: You begin with J and are most magnificently radiantly alive.

Jo Brand: He's on the turn.

Liza Tarbuck: James Blunt.

Stephen Fry: Closer, I grant you.

Sue Perkins: Jeremy Clarkson.

[forfeit klaxon goes off - JEREMY CLARKSON]

Stephen Fry: This is something that appears to be alive, but quite obviously isn’t.

Sue Perkins: Jedward then. I'm revising my original answer.

[forfeit klaxon goes off - JEDWARD]

Stephen Fry: I got jumbo wrists and I'm covered in tit juice. What have I been up to?

Sue Perkins: You've changed.

Jo Brand: Is it a night out with Tarbuck and Perkins?

Stephen Fry: There is a thing called Dogger Bank itch.

Sue Perkins: Guilty as charged.

Sue Perkins: I hate the word breasts.

Liza Tarbuck: I do, too.

Sue Perkins: Lets just say jugs...

Liza Tarbuck: ...tits...

Sue Perkins: ...bosom.

Stephen Fry: [weighing in] I like titties.

Sue Perkins and Liza Tarbuck: [unison] Do you?

Alan Davies: Historical death, if in doubt, syphilis.

Episode J.03 "Journeys"

Stephen Fry: Where the hell did I leave my passport?

Alan Davies: I lost mine in a plane once, and it had gone down, under the cushion of my seat. The actual plane seat. And I was on the plane for ages, I refused to get off the plane.

Stephen Fry: You have to get your seat disassembled. I’ve had that.

Alan Davies: And eventually I found it.

[There’s silence as everyone thinks he’s going to say more.]

Alan Davies: That’s the end of the story.

Stephen Fry: That was a beautiful story. That is a lovely, lovely story.

Rob Brydon: Stephen, is that Alan Davies or is that Peter Ustinov? That was one hell of an anecdote. If that is the level of the bar this evening, I may go home.

[ Stephen has strayed into matters of female intimate anatomy]

Phill Jupitus: It's like you're talking about Narnia or something. Some fantastical land you've only heard about.

Cal Wilson: You make your way through the fur coats and suddenly...

Stephen Fry: Woah. [hides his face in his hand]

Stephen Fry: What did Napoleon say to Josephine on his way back from a journey?

Alan Davies: I sense a trap! The only thing I know about Napoleon and Josephine was he said...

Stephen Fry: Yeah?

Alan Davies: What was it? Rob, what was it?

Rob Brydon: Phill?

Phill Jupitus: Cal?

Cal Wilson: I’m gonna do it. “I’m coming back. Don’t wash.”

[The klaxon goes off – ‘don’t wash’.]

Alan Davies: I only know the other one.

Stephen Fry: The other one, which might be...?

Alan Davies: It’s the one, Rob, what’s it...?

Rob Brydon: Phill, you know it.

Phill Jupitus: Cal...

Episode J.04 "Jack and Jill"

Stephen Fry: Now what’s a male ferret called?

Alan Davies: Jeff.

David Mitchell: It’s probably quite lucky, isn’t it, that nothing germinates from a discarded kebab. Our city centres would be even worse if these little disgusting saplings with doner meat...

Stephen Fry: What begins with J and was used by the first man to row the Atlantic to attempt suicide?

Alan Davies: Jizz.

Sue Perkins: Suicide by jizz?

Episode J.05 "J-Places"

Stephen Fry: What is the biggest joke ever to come out of Alaska?

Sandi Toksvig: Sarah Palin!

Stephen Fry: Within 10 years, tell me when this great, huge explosion...

Alan Davies: 1883.

Stephen Fry: 1883?

Bill Bailey: Um... 1882.

Stephen Fry: Right. Ladies and gentlemen, viewers at home, brace yourselves.

Bill Bailey: Oh, hello.

Stephen Fry: The explosion, the enormous, gigantic eruption of Krakatoa was in 1883.

Alan Davies: Thank you.

Stephen Fry: Can I just say, wtf?

Alan Davies: There was a documentary about it on the BBC where they re-enacted it.

Stephen Fry: Well remembered.

Episode J.06 "Joints"

Cal Wilson: I did have a similar experience to Jimmy’s, in New Zealand. I was going for a lady’s examination, and so lying there with this doctor doing the examination, and she was just tinkering away, and then she goes, “haven’t I seen you on Thank God You’re Here?”, which is a TV show back home, and I went, “Yes, but why are you recognising me now?”

Stephen Fry: Just out of interest, how many popes does the Vatican have per square kilometre?

Cal Wilson: How many popes? Like, buried, or in storage?

Stephen Fry: No, actually live, living popes.

Alan Davies: One.

Stephen Fry: No. It’s actually 2.27 recurring, because the Vatican City’s only 0.44 or a kilometre. So the average would be per square kilometre.

Jimmy Carr: Well, I think we have it, ladies and gentlemen, the most annoying question ever asked!

Episode J.07 "Journalism"

Episode J.08 "Jumble"

Stephen Fry: There’s been a study by the RSPCA at Sydney University, they found that whipping does not have the effect of horsing a speed up... uh, speeding a horse up.

Stephen Fry: We’re using our brains, well, some of us are using our brains.

Alan Davies: What do you mean by that?

Episode J.09 "Jeopardy“

Stephen Fry: What is Australia's deadliest animal?

Julia Zemiro: Oh! Rupert Murdoch!

Episode J.10 "Jungles"

Stephen Fry: What would be the best way for Tarzan to get around the jungle?

Alan Davies: He gets around by swimming, and swinging on, what does he swing on, Greg?

Greg Proops: Vines?

Stephen Fry: Whoa!

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - SWINGING ON VINES]

Stephen Fry: [points to Alan] You trapped him! Oh, Alan, you wicked, wicked - that was diabolical.

Alan Davies: I feel really good tonight. I think I’ve finally nailed this game.

Stephen Fry: I’m going to show you another animal, it’s a common blue butterfly, that has been described by the famous naturalist Geoffrey Grigson as having a particular smell.

Alan Davies: Finger of fudge.

Stephen Fry: Yes!

Alan Davies: What?!

Stephen Fry: Unbelievable! I mean, I’ve got to accept that because the answer is chocolate. That is amazing.

Stephen Fry: What lives underwater and is the loudest creature for its size? [Greg buzzes in] Greg Proops?

Greg Proops: Oprah.

Stephen Fry: Good answer, but untrue.

Alan Davies: Is it gonna be the blue whale?

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - BLUE WHALE]

Episode J.11 "Jumpers"

Alan Davies: What about when we went scuba diving and your mask was too tight?

Bill Bailey: Oh. Oh, yeah, I don’t...

Alan Davies: His eyes nearly came out of his head!

[Bill shakes his head.]

Alan Davies: They were inside the mask... these massive eyes! We’re all going, “look at Bill! Check he’s alright. Check he’s alright.” And when we found out he was alright, I laughed, I laughed my head off!

Bill Bailey: No, no, wait. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Rewind! Rewind. Can we just go back to the it where you said, “when you checked we were alright you laughed your head off.” You were laughing from the minute my face came out of the water. There was blood pouring out of my eyes.

Alan Davies: You had no idea. You had no idea at all.

Bill Bailey: I had no idea. I was going, “what?” and people were going, “oh my god!”

[Alan points and screams.]

Bill Bailey: Oh my god!” And I went, “what? What?” Like Carrie or something, with blood streaming from my eyes.

Alan Davies: It took quite a long time for them to recede as well.

Bill Bailey: Yes, it did. And a lot of laughing was going on.

Alan Davies: I thought you had some sort of magnifying mask on, but when you took the mask off they were still enormous!

Episode J.12 "Justice"

Brian Cox: What are the rules of sodomy?

Stephen Fry: It's...erm...um...eye-wateringly complex.

Jason Manford: I used to work at the Crown Court in Manchester, as a...erm...the accused.

[What reality show format did Charlemagne’s father invent?]

Rhys Darby: Ordeal or no Ordeal.

[After an episode of penis jokes at Alan Davies' expense.]

Stephen Fry: I don’t believe it, ladies and gentlemen, with a towering five inches, I mean, sorry, five points, Alan Davies!

Episode J.13 "Jobs"

Stephen Fry: Ada Lovelace was the daughter of...?

Alan Davies: Mr Software.

[Stephen drops his face into his hands.]

Stephen Fry: What would be the best planet to take your annual holiday on? Yes?

Sarah Millican: Earth.

Stephen Fry: Absolutely the right answer, I can frankly say. I don’t think there could be a better answer.

David Mitchell: Well, the great advantage of earth is that you can survive on it.

Stephen Fry: Yes.

David Mitchell: So lovely on a holiday, isn’t it? To just live through it.

Stephen Fry: Amazingly and finally, there is no minus score. Wow.

[The audience ooos appreciatively.]

Stephen Fry: In first place...

[Alan laughs.]

Alan Davies: Patronising bastards. I’ve had points before.

Episode J.14 "Jingle Bells“

Stephen Fry: Where did Beethoven put his 'Jingling Jolly'?

Sarah Millican: Mrs. Beethoven?

Danny Baker: Do you know what tinsel is? Mirrors for snakes.

Stephen Fry: Do you know how many Freudians it takes to change a light bulb? One to change the light bulb and another to hold the cock...father...ladder!

Stephen Fry: The great thing about Sainsburys, it keeps the scum out of Waitrose.

Stephen Fry: Do you know what that one was called, by any chance?

Alan Davies: Dave.

Stephen Fry: One day the answer might be Dave, one day the answer might be blue whale. You know what I’m looking forward to is when we have a blue whale called Dave and you don’t get it.

Stephen Fry: Little girls grow up to be women, and little boys grow up to be big little boys.

Episode J.15 "Jolly"

Tim Vine: I went to a Joke shop and said "What do you actually sell here?" and they said "Nothing, we're not a real shop."

Stephen Fry: What's the best flavour for an exploding sandwich?

Tim Vine: Cheese and Ham-grenade.

Stephen Fry: So, simple question, who’s happy?

[There’s silence. The picture on the screen changes to an older man with a younger woman.]

Alan Davies: He’s happy in the picture.

Julia Zemiro: Yep. Old men with young ladies. Oh, old ladies with young men. Why not? Not me.

Julia Zemiro: What about when you fall asleep and you wake up and you've had half your eyebrow shaved off?

Stephen Fry: Then you have bad friends.

Julia Zemiro: I do have hideous friends. Yeah, because that's the other thing that can happen. It's alright. I'm over it. It's fine.

Stephen Fry: Your eyebrows shaved off?

Julia Zemiro: Yeah, you know. Obviously no-one’s had this happen. Yeah, you fall asleep and someone goes 'ooh, this'll be even funnier.' put your hand in a bowl of thing and then voom, voom, you wake up and you look hideous.

Stephen Fry: That's just vile!

Julia Zemiro: [Shrugs.] I'm Australian.

[The panel has been asked to invent Limericks]

Julia Zemiro:

I carouse in a style bacchanalian

But I sleep in a way marsup-alian

I like to eat cheese

But I never say please

Yes, I’m French, but I’m also Australian.

Alan Davies:

There once was a show on TV

That was always the smart place to be

I’m fully aware

You’d rather be there

But instead you’re stuck here with me

Alan Davies:

It's easy to win on QI

You don't need an IQ that's high

Try not to be haughty

Just be a bit naughty

And make sure you please Stephen Fry.

Alan Davies:

Appearing one night on QI

I made up three facts on the fly

The first was untrue

The second was too

And the third was about the size of my cock and it was no exaggeration

Episode J.16 "Just the Job"

[Talking about dead bodies.]

Stephen Fry: I went to the body farm in Tennessee where I suddenly saw 200 never having seen a single one.

Sandi Toksvig: Sorry, the body farm?

Stephen Fry: It’s called the body farm.

Sandi Toksvig: Wow, we have the Body Shop, that’s not quite the same thing, is it?

Series K

Episode K.01 "Knees and Knockers"

David Mitchell: This programme would be an excellent house of reform. We let all the legislation come before us, we'll fiddle with, hopefully gag it up a bit, send it on to the Queen.

Stephen Fry: What is this noise, listen up carefully?

[a klaxon goes off]

Stephen Fry: Beginning with "K"...

Jack Whitehall: A klaxon.

[forfeit klaxon goes off - A KLAXON]

Alan Davies: [pointing at Jack] Ha, ha!

Stephen Fry: Yes, in a strange sort of way pop just et itself, didn't it?

David Mitchell: [Discussing Giant Panda's conversion from carnivore to herbivore] What happened that the pandas gave up on meat?

Stephen Fry: Evolution and their circumstances, their environs.

David Mitchell: Well, it's not working very well for them, evolution.

Stephen Fry: Are you going to get logically cross with them?

David Mitchell: It.. It seems...

Stephen Fry: They took a wrong step.

David Mitchell: ... idiotic. There's like 25 minutes a year when they can have sex and it'll work, if they can be bothered, which they never can. They look Ridiculous! [The rest of the panel object] I'm not saying they're not sweet, but they're not dignified, are they? [...] If you want to make Bungle from Rainbow seem high-status, bring on a panda.

Stephen Fry: What colour is a red kite?

Jack Whitehall: Blue!

Sara Pascoe: Black.

Alan Davies: Red.

David Mitchell: White.

Stephen Fry: Oh, thank you Alan.

[The klaxon goes off - RED.]]

Stephen Fry: The thing is, they were named before we had a word for Orange. We just used Red for anything that was Orange as well. We had the word orange for a fruit, but didn't use it for the colour until the 16th Century.

Sara Pascoe: We always think it was the colour that named the fruit, but it was the fruit that named the colour.

David Mitchell: In those days, people would say "What's the name of that red fruit? Oh, the orange"

Stephen Fry: Exactly.

David Mitchell: It could have been, not the orange that made it catch on, but the front of a robin. We could all have front-of-a-robin brand mobile phones. Where you go "What colour is it?" "Oh, it's front-of-a-robin".

Stephen Fry: It would be confusing.

David Mitchell: "I'm just eating an orange. It's such a bright shade of front-of-a-robin".

Episode K.02 "Kit and Kaboodle"

Stephen Fry: Now, in case anybody is wondering, because he hasn't done that much television in Britain, we found Colin in Australia. Colin, in 1994, you won the Perrier award, didn't you? For comedy, at the Edinburgh Fringe?

Colin Lane: Yes.

Stephen Fry: An incredibly distinguished award to win, as [clears throat] I know.

Colin Lane: You haven't won the Perrier award, Stephen?

Stephen Fry: Yes, I did win it.

Colin Lane: Oh, you did?

Stephen Fry: My group was the first to win it ever.

Colin Lane: The first?

Stephen Fry: As it happens, yeah. But, I wonder: who did you beat in 1994? Who came second?

Colin Lane: Uh, there were a few other nominees.

[Alan exhales]

Colin Lane: Uh, I think the main competition came from a little fellow...

[Alan yawns]

Colin Lane: His name was Alan Davies.

Alan Davies: Oh, whatever.

Colin Lane: Alan Davies, yes.

Alan Davies: I went to Melbourne and I stayed at Colin's house and he put the Perrier award on the bedside table.

Alan Davies: Can you, like when you drop your phone in the loo you’re supposed to put it in a tub of rice to get the moisture out.

Stephen Fry: Indeed.

Alan Davies: Can you do that with cat litter?

Stephen Fry: There’s an episode of Elementary which is based on that very fact.

Alan Davies: There’s an episode of Jonathan Creek where I weed in some cat litter. Not I, the character Jonathan.

Stephen Fry: Let’s work backwards as to how that could possibly be a plot line, that you peed...

Alan Davies: I just got trapped in a cellar for ages, and I needed a wee.

Stephen Fry: Oh, I see. Well that’s fair enough.

Stephen Fry: What comes flat-packed and takes 4 months to assemble?

Colin Lane: IKEA, IKEA dining table.

[Forfeit klaxon goes off: ANYTHING FROM IKEA]

Stephen Fry: We thought of that, I'm afraid. Sorry: [Australian Accent] sorry, Lano.

[later in the conversation]

Stephen Fry: Where is the world's largest branch of IKEA?

Noel Fielding: Wembley?

Colin Lane: Australia?

Stephen Fry: Yes. Which city? You'll be annoyed.

Colin Lane: Sydney?

Stephen Fry: Yes, Sydney. As Melbourner, you'll be properly annoyed...

Colin Lane: [between gritted teeth] Great city. Lovely people.

Stephen Fry: ...he said between clenched teeth.

Noel Fielding: I did some gigs there and I played the Opera House. And I was in the Opera House, doing some press. And I looked out of the window thinking, "Where's the Opera House?" Actually scanning the horizon. "Where's the Opera House gone? You're in it, you idiot!"

Ross Noble: You should have gone [looks up] "Whoa!"

[on discussion of the biggest things in Australia being classed as "The Biggest in the Southern Hemisphere"]

Ross Noble: The best one ever is in: have you been to Narrandera? Where they've got the southern hemisphere's 2nd largest playable guitar. They've gone:

"We've got the world's biggest guitar."

"No, it's not."

"Playable guitar?"

"Southern Hemisphere's?"

"They've what?"

"The Southern Hemisphere's 2nd largest playable guitar."

And you can see the signs being crossed out.

Stephen Fry: The second largest fish in the world is...?

Alan Davies: Is it a big squid?

Stephen Fry: Fish.

Alan Davies: A jellyfish?

Stephen Fry: ...A fish.

Episode K.03 "K-Folk"

[On the Korean phrase "When will I eat your noodles?" meaning "When are we getting married?"]

Stephen Fry: [To Alan] But you're already married, so I'm not going to eat your noodles. And you didn't invite me to your wedding.

Alan Davies: I did invite you. You didn't come.

Stephen Fry: [facepalms in embarrassment]

Alan Davies: Yeah, you know what you were doing? You were filming an episode of Bones.

Stephen Fry: Yes, I was.

Alan Davies: I’ve never been so insulted in my life.

Stephen Fry: I’m so sorry. How embarrassing. I’m so sorry.

[On the Korean phrase "He worked like he was attending the grave of his wife's uncle" meaning "They didn't put much effort into the job"]

Katherine Ryan: So, like "shagging the dog"?

Stephen Fry: Not really. Not really, Katherine. Is there something you want to share with us? "Like shagging the dog?"

Katherine Ryan: Yeah, if you don't work very hard, you're just shagging the dog.

Stephen Fry: NOT IN THIS COUNTRY, MADAM! IN THIS COUNTRY WHEN WE SHAG A DOG WE KNOW WHAT WE ARE DOING! And it is pretty hard work, let me tell you...

Alan Davies: Not as easy as it looks, let me tell you that.

Stephen Fry: So, in Canada, you have the phrase "shagging the dog"?

Katherine Ryan: Yeah, or "shagging the sheep" if you want.

Stephen Fry: Again, perfectly common practice over here, but not considered a light or unburdensome task.

Katherine Ryan: It just means, like, having an easy day.

Stephen Fry: There's a lot I have to learn about Canada...

[Stephen is about to launch one of his knick-knacks]

Phill Jupitus: There's just too many double entendres. You pumping custard?

Stephen Fry: Stop it. Are you ready for me to pump the custard?

Phill Jupitus: Yes, I'm ready to pump your custard. [puts his head on the desk]

Josh Widdicombe: This is not how I wanted to go.

Alan Davies: [shouting] It's quite warm there actually. I could feel the heat right there. If had been sitting there, I could have been: [normal voice] I could have been ignited.

Stephen Fry: You could have been covered in hot custard.

Phill Jupitus: I told you, before you did this experiment...

Episode K.04 "Knits and Knots"

Stephen Fry: Thorns are modified branches or stems. Prickles are part of the skin, which is what those are, they come out from the skin.

Ross Noble: So when Bon Jovi sang "Every rose has a thorn..."

Stephen Fry: They were lying.

Ross Noble: ...he made an absolute fool of himself. That would be great wouldn't it, if you went to a Bon Jovi gig. "Every rose has a ..." Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! [imitates forfeit klaxon]

Sue Perkins: Biggest knitted object? Well, I’ve had my doubts about Venus for a long time...

Stephen Fry: Is there a word for prostitute that begins with a silent k?

Sue Perkins: Knob gobbler.

Episode K.05 "Kings"

[On posteriors]

Stephen Fry: If you had a colonoscopy, you know, 24 hours before you would have to take these unbelievably powerful, er...

Bill Bailey: Hallucinogenics?

[The audience and Stephen start laughing as Bill starts slouching in his chair and talking in a Texas accent.]

Bill Bailey: Wow, wowee, ah ha! Oh, I'm being taken by a space octopus!

[Bill's buzzer suddenly goes off without him touching it.]

Bill Bailey: I didn't even touch it!

Stephen Fry: What has 20 legs, 5 heads and can't reach its own nuts?

Jeremy Clarkson: Westlife.

Stephen Fry: Oh, ho-ho-ho. Oh, you're so lucky. You're so lucky, cos I know what the klaxon was.

Jeremy Clarkson: Ha-ha!

Jimmy Carr: I presume the klaxon: shall I?

Stephen Fry: Yeah, go on.

Jimmy Carr: One Direction?

Stephen Fry: Oh!

[Forfeit Klaxon goes off - ONE DIRECTION]

[later on in the conversation]

Stephen Fry: It sounds like a gypsy band, but it's the squirrel kings. What would squirrel kings be?

Bill Bailey: The best squirrel?

Stephen Fry: Well, oddly enough, it's really unfortunate. They squirm around on trees. But sometimes trees exude, a sticky sap. And when the baby squirrels get their tails caught in the sticky sap, their tails get stuck together. And you get this (cuts to image of 5 squirrels stuck together by their tails). Absolutely stuck together.

[Audience goes "aww!"]

Jeremy Clarkson: Oh, that's fucking hysterical!

[Laughter]

Jeremy Clarkson: Seriously they're stuck together?!?! [cackles]

Stephen Fry: You're so bad! You are so bad! The audience goes "aww"!

Jeremy Clarkson: It's not! It's the funniest thing I've ever heard of! And they're never going to be organised enough to go "Ready, steady" and run off in different directions. They'll never be able to do that!

[On plans to turn King's Cross into an indoor landing place for planes.]

Alan Davies: Quite difficult to land on a, kind of a bend though.

Stephen Fry: I think you use the straight bits.

[The audience starts laughing.]

Jimmy Carr: That would have been an amazing pilot's last words. 'This is tricky...'

Jimmy Carr: Is Pippa Middleton royal?

Stephen Fry: [haughtily] No. She's not even a weather girl.

Episode K.06 "Killers"

[Talking about orcas.]

Stephen Fry: And they’re not whales.

Alan Davies: They’re people.

Episode K.07 "Knowledge"

Alan Davies: What does encyclopaedia mean? Because it sounds like a kiddy fiddler on a bike.

Graham Linehan: If I’ve forgotten someone’s name, I just say, ‘excuse me for a second,’ and then I go home.

Episode K.08 "Keys"

Tim Minchin: [After setting off a klaxon.] I’m Alan Davies!

Episode K.09 "Kinetic"

Stephen Fry: [After Alan gets a question right.] A jolly encouraging and patronising round of applause to you.

Stephen Fry: We know one person who did not escape, don’t we Alan? Who out of his natural curiosity sat down on a chair, tied a pillow to his head with a napkin and watched it, and then suffocated.

Alan Davies: Yes.

Stephen Fry: And his name was? Your old friend...?

Alan Davies: Pliny.

Stephen Fry: Pliny! Hooray.

Alan Davies: It’s always Pliny.

Episode K.10 "Keeps"

Bill Bailey: What would happen?

Stephen Fry: If?

Bill Bailey: No, I’m just saying, it’s rhetorical. There’s a question. What would happen, Stephen? Discuss.

Stephen Fry: Sheep from the island of Lesbos were transported around Europe and they had foot and mouth disease and they communicated it all around Europe.

Alan Davies: Oh.

Stephen Fry: So lesbian sheep were responsible for an outbreak in 1994.

Alan Davies: Well, you need Jonathan Creek to get that one.

Stephen Fry: Well, there you are. So that's pretty exciting, isn't it?

Bill Bailey: Well...

Alan Davies: No, it's not, really.

Episode K.11 "Kinky"

Janet Street-Porter: How do pigeons have sex?

Stephen Fry: In the normal way. Is this news to you?

[On the varied contents of the Kama Sutra, one of which is a lemonade recipe.]

Sandi Toksvig: I love the idea of a child setting up a lemonade stand "Courtesy of the Kamasutra"

[On the unusual habits of the American Author of the Kamasutra Book]

Stephen Fry: He also trained himself to insert pencils into his penis. Not only a pencil though: a toothbrush, bristles first!

Audience: NO!

Johnny Vegas: Well, what? Every year, while his wife is going "He's impossible to buy for" and he's going "A TRAVEL POUCH! A PENCILCASE! I'M TIRED OF CARRYING THINGS ROUND IN ME PENIS!" "What about a travel wallet?" "NO!"

Episode K.12 "Knights and Knaves"

Victoria Coren Mitchell: This is something my husband told me...

Stephen Fry: David Mitchell told you something, and you believe it?

Episode K.13 "Kitchen Sink"

Victoria Wood: Have you not got a television?

Stephen Fry: Yes, but I’m always on it.

Episode K.14 "Kris Kringle"

[on discussion on why Santa doesn't have a place on Forbes' fictional rich list]

Stephen Fry: Yes, young Brendan.

Brendan O'Carroll: Is it because [whispers] he may not be real?

Stephen Fry: *gasps*

[forfeit klaxon goes off - HE'S NOT REAL]

Brendan O'Carroll: YES!

Stephen Fry: Oh, poor Phill...

[Phill heads over to the screen and collapses in disbelief]

Stephen Fry: But, Phill: that got a klaxon. So that can't be right.

[Phill runs over to hug Stephen]

Stephen Fry: It's alright.

[Phill sits back down]

Phill Jupitus: Carry on...

[same conversation]

Alan Davies: So why is Santa off of the rich list?

Stephen Fry: It's a very simple reason. It's a fictional rich-list. And Santa is real!

[To the tune of "O, Tannenbaum"]

Jo Brand: Neil Kinnock's hair is deeply red.

Jo Brand: though most of it's not on his head.

[Classical Ringtone]

Stephen Fry: (to Brendan) Is that your phone?

Brendan O'Carroll: Yes.

[Panel and Audience Laughs as Brendan covers his face in shame]

Brendan O'Carroll: It's Heston Blumenthal!

Stephen Fry: Minus how many points, I'm wondering?

Brendan O'Carroll: I'm so sorry. I didn't even know I had it on me!

Episode K.15 "Kitsch"

Stephen Fry: Do you know the name for a group of kittens?

Jimmy Carr: A sack of?

Sue Perkins: A puke?

Jimmy Carr: Do you know the Boomerang joke?

Stephen Fry: Go on.

Jimmy Carr: It'll come back to you.

Stephen Fry: I walked into that one.

Alan Davies: It just goes in the bin, doesn’t it, bubble wrap, once you’ve popped it.

Stephen Fry: Or you sit in front of the telly relieving yourself.

[Alan gives Stephen a pointed look.]

Stephen Fry: You know what I mean.

Alan Davies: Yes. But let’s get back to the bubble wrap.

Episode K.16 "Kaleidoscope"

[A klaxon goes off.]

Alan Davies: Not me. Wasn’t me. I didn’t do anything.

Series L

Episode L.01 "L-Animals"

Stephen Fry: What has 32 brains and sucks?

Alan Davies: [points towards the audience] The front row.

Ross Noble: Are you suggesting...?

Colin Lane: I’m not suggesting...

Ross Noble: Are you suggesting that I’m somehow pleasuring a whale?

Alan Davies: A sperm whale’s penis is about 3 metres long.

Episode L.02 "Location, Location, Location"

Stephen Fry: What would you find at the exact centre of the observable universe?

Alan Davies: You?

[Later]

Johnny Vegas: Isn't the sun the centre of the universe?

Stephen Fry: [Bursts out in patronizing laughter, catches himself] Well, sorry for my laughter.

Johnny Vegas: What a way to build me confidence!

Aisling Bea: I thought that was a serious question as well and we both looked at you and you looked at us like the peasants of the land. "Will we ever be free of this tyranny? [throws back her head] Bwa, haw, haw! Never, never, never!"

Johnny Vegas: Doesn't the Wicked Hall Witch live there? Haw, haw haw...

Stephen Fry: I'm sorry that it sounded quite so patronizing. The centre of the universe is apparently Bank street and Sixth street in Wallace, Idaho or...

Johnny Vegas: The sun.

Johnny Vegas and Aisling Bea: [going "haw haw haw" and high-fiveing each other]

Stephen Fry: You beasts, you beasts, you unutterable beasts.

[On the formation of the Moon.]

Jason Manford: They invented a theory to keep the argument alive?

Stephen Fry: Basically.

Jason Manford: I had an ex-girlfriend like that.

Stephen Fry: If you brought a cat or a dog to feed to the lions. Or the tigers. They had tigers as well. And they had bears.

Aisling Bea: Oh, my.

Episode L.03 "Literature"

Jack Whitehall: Good books, you don't need to bother reading. Like it's controversial to say it, but I don't think Harry Potter is worth reading, because its so expertly narrated on the audio-books [which Stephen Fry narrated]. [Laughter] You know after I listened to the Harry Potter books with you narrating them, everything in my life is narrated by Stephen Fry. All my thoughts, my internal monologue is now Stephen Fry's voice. Even the dirty thoughts. [Laughter] It makes it acceptable. I had a sexual thought the other day, I put my hand in the air, I had a sexual thought about Camilla Parker Bowles. It didn’t seem weird, [points at Stephen] because Stephen was saying it.

Jack Whitehall: [Gets a question right and rips open his shirt in excitement, baring his chest.]

Stephen Fry: You made a happy man feel very old.

Stephen Fry: Who likes clowns?

Jack Whitehall: UKIP supporters. They are kind fun and comical and wear silly clothes. But they are also terrifying.

Lloyd Langford: They also have a lot of white faces.

[Stephen and Victoria Coren Mitchell are locked in a debate about the origin of the word "luncheon"]

Jack Whitehall: This is like watching two great stags...

[The debate continues]

Jack Whitehall: [imitating a tannoy] 30-15, Fry.

Episode L.04 "Levity"

Frank Skinner: I was at the airport in Belfast and I bought the journal of the Titanic Society. It's sort of a photocopy but quite a fat thing. And I read it, it's about a hundred pages, lots of stuff about the Captain and how it's put together, not one reference in the entire book to the fact that it sank. I love it when people are positive. With the Titanic Society, their ship is always half empty of water.

Frank Skinner: Was it Bill Tidy who did the most fantastic cartoon of all time? It was a queue of people and it said "Information About Titanic". And people would queue up to find out about survivors, women in shawls, and at the back there's two polar bears standing, calling "Any news about the iceberg?".

Stephen Fry: How did Chicago get completely screwed up?

Sue Perkins: They brought Catherine Zeta-Jones in.

Stephen Fry: My legs went to jelly. I did this thing with Bear Grylls, where I had to rappell down a sheer face. I was never so terrified in my entire life. I got there, and I...

Alan Davies: Sorry, you rappelled down Bear Grylls face?

Stephen Fry: He chose the face.

Alan Davies: And then your legs went to jelly.

Stephen Fry: The really frightening thing was, you know, he took me to the edge and then there was 45 minutes...

Sue Perkins: Sorry, Bear Grylls took you to the edge?

Stephen Fry: [double facepalms]

Sue Perkins: All I know about space is taken entirely from Sandra Bullock's performance in Gravity

Sue Perkins: We know a little bit about it. We know that thunderbolt and lightning, is very, very frightening.

Sue Perkins: Lightning goes upwards?

Stephen Fry: Oh, yes. Absolutely.

Sue Perkins: Wrong.

Episode L.05 "Lenses"

[on the discussion of Napoleon III]

Phill Jupitus: I had no idea we had a hipster Napoleon.

Stephen Fry: Oh, yeah!

Phill Jupitus: Check it out. "Yeah, could I have a flat white please? Yeah, the jacket? I got it at this vintage place: it's great."

Stephen Fry: Why would you keep a leash on a leech?

Phill Jupitus: Is it a medicinal leech?

Stephen Fry: Yes it is.

Jo Brand: They use them in the NHS today, don't they?

Stephen Fry: Yes, they do. They absolutely do.

Alan Davis: You put them on a wound, don't you? And they eat bits that are infected.

Phill Jupitus: No, that's the maggots.

Josh Widdecombe: Have I travelled back in time?

Stephen Fry: No!

Phill Jupitus: And migraine headaches are caused by a demon living in your head!

[On the discussion of the use of leeches helping heal capillaries]

Josh Widdecombe: Does it hurt?

Stephen Fry: It doesn't really hurt much, no no.

Phill Jupitus: What do you mean, how'd you know?

Stephen Fry: Well, I'm told it doesn't hurt.

Phill Jupitus: I don't you and your public school ways. "Fry, time for a leeching!"

Alan Davies: "Scrotum!"

Phill Jupitus: "Yes, sir!"

"Get Fry!"

Stephen Fry: It doesn't hurt as much as double...

Alan Davies: "It's time for his leeching."

"What do you want Scrotum?"

:"It's time for your leeching, Fry."

Stephen Fry: It doesn't hurt as much as Dr. Stavely slamming your dick in a desk, I admit. But - Look, I love to shock you - it's sweet.

Josh Widdecombe: Do you remember John Wayne Bobbitt?

Phill Jupitus: Yeah, he went to Winchester.

Stephen Fry: Of course, we remember Bobbitt. His wife severed his...

Alan Davies: Yeah, she cut his penis off and threw it out of the window of a moving car, so it took some finding. But then they sewed it back on and he made some money out of porn films, weirdly.

Stephen Fry: He must have been rather impressed that a penis took some finding was found. He must have thought "Yes"!

Josh Widdecombe: That's why they found the right one: that would have been a disaster.

Phill Jupitus: I could imagine him at the line up. "Could I see number 3 again?"

Stephen Fry: You're too used to that program: that's just sick.

Stephen Fry: Who's in charge of all the ants?

Jo Brand: Adam.

Stephen Fry: Very good.

[forfeit klaxon goes off - ADAM ANT]

Jo Brand: NO!

Stephen Fry: We were there before you, I'm afraid.

Josh Widdecombe: Is it a queen?

Stephen Fry: A queen ant? Of course, that's gonna get a klaxon.

[forfeit klaxon goes off - THE QUEEN]

Episode L.06 "Liblabble"

Stephen Fry: What has four legs and a sense of humour?

Bill Bailey: Ant and Dec.

Stephen Fry: India's first nuclear device. Do you know what that was called, and what it might have been?

Alan Davies: It was a curry.

Stephen Fry: What's the most depressing radio program of all time?

Alan Davies: [Immediately] Oh, Simon Bates! By miles.

Stephen Fry: [Imitating Simon Bates, presenting Our Tune ] But surely. that's the story of people who fell in love. She did die of the cancer, but...

Bill Bailey: She battled through the cancer and here's her song: Too Drunk To Fuck

[On the most depressing radio programme ever.]

Richard Coles: I had several correspondents who would say that Saturday Live is the most depressing radio programme.

Stephen Fry: Really? [points to screen]

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - "SATURDAY LIVE"]

Stephen Fry: What colour are the flags on the moon?

Alan Davies: Well, do they look different? When you're there? Are there no flags? There's no moon... oh god.

[The audience starts laughing as Alan clutches his nose in despair.]

Alan Davies: I could just hear about 100 klaxons sounding.

Episode L.07 "Lethal"

Stephen Fry: They go on a extraordinary shagging spree. I mean its quite ugly, but I give you the details, because they are pretty amazing: It's semelparous, meaning they only do it once, and it is about 12 hours on the job with one female, before it moves on to the next. It doesn't eat or sleep, but keeps going in a testosterone driven frenzy...

Sandi Toksvig: Oh never mind about him, that poor female. Twelve hours. She must be chafed.

Stephen Fry: To get the necessary energy the male's body has stripped its body of all the nutrients and suppressed the immune system, by the end of a fortnight they are physically exhausted, bald, gangrenous, ravaged by stress and infection and keel over and die. Russell Brand, take note.

Stephen Fry: How fast was the fastest mass extinction in history, in years...

Bill Bailey: The Liberal Democrats.

Bill Bailey: UKIP are like Top Gear for people who don't like cars.

Stephen Fry: Now. Alan, would you take a bullet for me?

Alan Davies: Yes, Stephen.

Stephen Fry: Aw, thank you. Very good.

[forfeit klaxon goes off - YES]

Alan Davies: Sorry: no I wouldn't!

Stephen Fry: Why do people fall over when they've been shot?

Jason Manford: Because they've just been shot.

[Sandi shakes Jason's hand: forfeit flashes on screen]

Jason Manford: Oh!

[forfeit klaxon goes off - BECAUSE THEY'VE JUST BEEN SHOT]

Episode L.08 "Lovely"

Stephen Fry: Christopher Hitchens rather wonderfully said: The four most overrated things in the world are: lobster, champagne, anal sex and picnics.

Stephen Fry: What wouldn't you want to get on Valentine's Day?

Alan Davies: Chlamydia.

Stephen Fry: Perfectly reasonable response.

Josh Widdicombe: Is that what VD stands for?

Stephen Fry: Who would bite their arms off to get a leg over?

Josh Widdicombe: [presses his buzzer "Love is all around me", points at himself]

Stephen Fry: You?

[forfeit klaxon sounds - ME]

Stephen Fry: Even if we hadn't got that one ready, it would reveal what a sad act you are.

[On the short lived shop [2] selling ice cream made from human breast milk.]

Stephen Fry: You try it once. Like incest or Country Dancing.

Stephen Fry: There is a whole generation of people, if they are channel surfing and see something in black and white, they will never stop to look at it. Which is extraordinary, given that most of the best films ever...

Alan Davies: [incredulously] Not even Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid?

Stephen Fry: Most of the best films ever made were in black and white, it just seems so extraordinary...

Alan Davies: Not even Broadway Danny Rose?

Stephen Fry: I know, I know...Elephant Man.

Josh Widdicombe: Why did you point at me when you said Elephant Man?

Stephen Fry: A lot of military figures had articles of clothing named after them. Particularly, for some reason, the Crimean War. There was Lord Cardigan, who was in charge of the Light Brigade.

Alan Davies: Balaclava.

Stephen Fry: The Balaclava Helmet, absolutely. And...?

Alan Davies: Jodhpur.

Stephen Fry: Jodhpur’s a place, I think.

Alan Davies: Doctor Martin.

Stephen Fry: The Raglan Sleeve...

Alan Davies: Lord Bobblehat.

Episode L.09 "Ladies and Gents"

Stephen Fry: Now, Ladies first. [smiles exaggeratedly at Kathy Lette and Sue Perkins]

Sue Perkins: You smoothie.

Stephen Fry: [seriously] Why shouldn't you have the vote?

Stephen Fry: Doctors suggested because they thought it would make more people come forward with STDs because they would be less embarrassed to say they caught it from a lavatory seat, then that they caught it from a whore strumpet harlot.

Alan Davies: Or parent.

Stephen Fry: Or parent. Or parent?! Don’t make me repeat things without thinking.

Episode L.10 "Lying"

[on the colour magenta]

Stephen Fry: So it's a kind of can't-really-exist colour and yet it does. It's what you might call, I suppose, [chuckles] a Pigment of the Imagination.

[On Jack Whitehall's inability to drive]

Adam Hills: Do you think you're good in bed?

Jack Whitehall: No I haven't passed that test either. I failed on three majors and one minor...

Stephen Fry: Was there an emergency stop? These are the worst...

Jack Whitehall: I kept changing lanes, when I shouldn't...

Adam Hills: I’m not quite au fait with prosthetics, but I’ll give it a crack. [Adam Hills is well known for incorporating his prosthetic foot into his comedy routines.]

Episode L.11 "Lumped Together"

[The panel and Stephen Fry are building Lava lamps from water, oil and Alka-Seltzers]

David Mitchell: This genuinely reminds me so much of school. You said "Don't put all the Alka-Seltzers in", and Alan said "We're putting them all in" and I've gone along with him and now I'm frightened.

[In the ensuing hilarity Stephen knocks over his Lava lamp, spilling the contents]

Jimmy Carr and Ronni Ancona: [Raising their hands] Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir!

Stephen Fry: Alright! Mitchell, you made me laugh! I told you before...

Alan Davies: You're in trouble!

Stephen Fry: There's nothing funny about making people laugh. Well, maybe. This isn't how it was supposed to happen at all. [large box of tissues are put on the desk] And we all know why Alan has industrial strength tissues...

David Mitchell: The chain Argos, they call their staff Argonauts to this day.

Stephen Fry: [Surprised] Oh, do they?

David Mitchell: [deadpan] No.

Jimmy Carr: The father of history, what was he called?

Stephen Fry: Herodotus.

Jimmy Carr: Herodotus. It must have been a lot easier, when he was around. I'm not having a go at him. But less things have happened back then.

Stephen Fry: Fewer things.

Alan Davies: Common usage, common usage.

Jimmy Carr: This is so like being back at school, it's unbelievable.

Alan Davies: Apparently you can say Lesser now...

David Mitchell: Apparently you can just say what you like these days! Apparently you're not allowed to scream Idiot! at people. What's the point in getting an education at all? I know how to use the apostrophe. Apparently, now it doesn't matter. [rapturous applause from the audience] I want the time it took me to learn that back.

Jimmy Carr: You need to be less bothered about this. Or fewer bothered. You need to be fewer bothered about this kind of thing. Just let it go: be fewer upset.

Episode L.12 "No-L (Christmas Special)"

Stephen Fry: These are all good answers.

Carrie Fisher: Really?

Jimmy Carr: [To Carrie Fisher] Also, do you know where the rebel base is?

Carrie Fisher: [Pointing at his crotch] In your pants.

Jimmy Carr: [fans himself]

Episode L.13 "Lucky Losers"

[on the rules for this episode]

Stephen Fry: Now, seeing as this is the "Lucky Losers" show, whoever gets the lowest score wins.

Danny Baker: Well done Alan! You've won already, congratulations!

[on Club 18-30 Holidays]

Stephen Fry: Do you remember they had rather dodgy slogans? Do you remember any of them?

Alan Davies: "You will get fucked."

Jeremy Clarkson: Yeah.

[Applause from the Audience]

Jeremy Clarkson: "Would you like to catch chlamydia?"

Stephen Fry: Both cardinally and financially. Well, it wasn't quite as on the nose as that. It was...

Jeremy Clarkson: Herpes?

Stephen Fry: ..."Beaver Espania" was one.

Alan Davies: Oh, God!

Stephen Fry: I know. "It's not all sex, sex, sex, there's some sun and sea as well." It really puts you off.

[Later on in the conversation]

Jeremy Clarkson: You know, there's no symptoms, when you have chlamydia. So, if someone says "how are you?" and they say, "Very well", that means, you almost certainly have it.

Stephen Fry: It's the perfect disease.

Jeremy Clarkson: It is. So I never know how anyone goes to the Doctor's with it. It would be quite interesting.

Stephen Fry: There's no warts, no weeping?

Jeremy Clarkson: No green discharge.

[Sandi shudders]

Stephen Fry: He has to be frank about these things.

Jeremy Clarkson: You'll wake up completely fine, go to the Doctor's, you'll have chlamydia. It's baffling and koalas all have it.

Sandi Toksvig: How do you know that?!?!

Jeremy Clarkson: Huge problem in Australia. They've all got chlamydia and they are dying.

Sandi Toksvig: I thought it was an add-on to an 18-30 Australian holiday. "If you don't get lucky, there's always the koalas."

Stephen Fry: Which good cause benefitted from Britain's first lottery?

Jeremy Clarkson: Dale Winton. Dale Winton's tanning salon.

Stephen Fry: What do newsagents sell that make people suddenly want to vote Tory?

Alan Davis: Is it going to be the Daily Mail?

[Forfeit Klaxon goes off - DAILY MAIL]

Stephen Fry: Makes me want to vote communist, actually.

Alan Davies: Do you get one for the Daily Telegraph as well?

Stephen Fry: You probably might. Yes!

[Forfeit Klaxon goes off - DAILY TELEGRAPH]

Stephen Fry: This is a very odd thing, that newsagents sell...

Alan Davies: What about The Sun?

[Forfeit Klaxon goes off - THE SUN]

Stephen Fry: [to Alan] You're on fire!

[On discussion of various syndromes]

Stephen Fry: Perhaps even more depressing, is that American therapists have a name for the syndrome, which "sudden wealth syndrome" [starts sniggering]. Which is presumably something they suffer from whenever they name a syndrome. They make money by deciding you have a syndrome.

Sandi Toksvig: That's a really boring name for it though.

Stephen Fry: You'd think so, yeah. But these are the same people who say, if you lose someone you love: they die, and you are still...

[Alan sneezes loudly]

Danny Baker: Whoa! Wow! Wow, that was so huge.

Sandi Toksvig: That was so impressive.

Danny Baker: That was enormous!

Stephen Fry: The day had to happen.

Jeremy Clarkson: I mean, that was an explosion!

Danny Baker: That's extraordinary!

Stephen Fry: Are you alright?

Jeremy Clarkson: There are people now in California, looking at their seismographs, going "Jesus Christ! What was THAT?!?!"

Danny Baker: What a thing!

Stephen Fry: Is it because I said the word 'die'? Da! Don't do it again...

Alan Davies: So sorry for interrupting.

[On discussion of names]

Danny Baker: Where you plagued at school by people who: "Turkish Delight"?

Stephen Fry: Oh yeah. "Turkish delight, don't like it, keeps you up at night." No it doesn't!

Danny Baker: Have you tried "Dan Dan, the lavatory man, washed his hair with a frying pan, combed his hair with a leg of a chair, Dan Dan?" Or Danny Boy. There are certain songs that curse you through your life, if you have certain names.

Stephen Fry: Yeah.

Jeremy Clarkson: All I got was, "What sort of a fucking name is Jeremy "?

Stephen Fry: Could you beat a T-Rex at arm wrestling?

Jeremy Clarkson: Yes, easily.

Stephen Fry: "Yes, easily?"

[Forfeit Klaxon goes off]

Jeremy Clarkson: Finally got one.

Stephen Fry: Well done.

[Text YES, EASILY flashes on the screen]

Stephen Fry: Oh, even the word "easily"!

Jeremy Clarkson: Either those are the fastest typers in the world, or I was bang on.

Alan Davies: I’m winning, therefore I’m losing.

Stephen Fry: Now, a question especially for Alan to lose points with in this lucky losers show. Which mammal has the most cells in its body?

Alan Davies: Blue whale.

[A special fireworks klaxon goes off - ‘blue whale bonus’.]

Stephen Fry: It does. And you get a lot of points for that. It’s the blue whale bonus and you get points. And what do points mean? Bad surprises.

Alan Davies: What?

Stephen Fry: Which day is added to a leap year?

Alan Davies: February the 29th.

Stephen Fry: Ah, well done, absolutely.

[The klaxon goes off - ‘February 29’.]

Alan Davies: Right. Well it is. I’m standing my ground on this one.

Episode L.14 "Little and Large"

[on penguins]

Stephen Fry: What is it about them that is so endearing?

Phill Jupitus: They're delicious.

Richard Osman: There's a story the other day about the American scientist who is there and he decides to turn tinder on. You know tinder? The dating app? And he got a date with a woman in a tent 45 minutes away.

Stephen Fry: You're kidding me! That's hilarious

[...]

Phill Jupitus: Grindr however: All penguins.

[Stephen has handed out plastic bags to the panel]

Phill Jupitus: Ah, time for the controversial auto-erotic asphyxiation round.

Alan Davies: A blue whale at a birthday party? Well, they take up a lot of room. You’d need a big hall.

Stephen Fry: Yep.

Richard Osman: That’s good, I think you’re getting there.

Alan Davies: Yeah? That’s good encouragement, thanks, Richard.

Richard Osman: That’s okay.

Alan Davies: It’d be fun for the kids to get inside, couldn’t they? Play around.

Richard Osman: Bouncy castle.

Stephen Fry: Bouncy asshole, did you say?

Richard Osman: No. I didn’t, but by all means...

Stephen Fry: Now, who said, ‘the most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me, but tall soldiers, they are my weakness’?

Alan Davies: You did.

[The klaxon goes off – ‘you did’.]

Episode L.15 "Long Lost"

Jimmy Carr: Should we have a klaxon? You want a klaxon?

Stephen Fry: What are you going to say?

Jimmy Carr: Brucie.

[Forfeit Klaxon goes off - BRUCE FORSYTH]

Jimmy Carr: Obviously, if you're watching...

Stephen Fry: Love, respect. Everything.

Stephen Fry: What human endurance record gets broken every 8 months?

Alan Davies: Pregnancy.

Stephen Fry: Can you name a famous person who is kept in cryonic preservation?

Jimmy Carr: Walt Disney.

[Forfeit Klaxon goes off - WALT DISNEY]

Stephen Fry: Quite a few people believe in cryonic preservation, but Walt Disney?

Jimmy Carr: You need to do that in a more Scottish voice. Once again, more Scottish.

Stephen Fry: (in Scottish accent) Quite a few people believe in cryonic preservation, but Walt Does'nae.

Stephen Fry: How many moons does the earth have?

Alan Davies: Oh, God.

Suggs: Most definitely, only one.

[Forfeit Klaxon goes off - ONE]

Stephen Fry: Oh dear, of course. It had to be that.

Jimmy Carr: What is the moon? I think I'm with him.

Alan Davies: They changed it.

[Forfeit Klaxon goes off - ONE, "THE" MOON]

Suggs: The one and only moon!

Stephen Fry: What’s the world’s longest experiment?

Alan Davies: QI.

Episode L.16 "Landmarks"

Stephen Fry: Would you rather get an eMail from a Spanish Prisoner or a Nigerian Prince?

Colin Lane: A Nigerian Prince.

Stephen Fry: Why's that? [slightly under-breath] Please pray.

Colin Lane: What?

Stephen Fry: Why's that?

Colin Lane: I have no reason, I'm using the 50/50 rule.

Stephen Fry: Both are pretty bad options, to be honest.

Colin Lane: Can you trust a Nigerian Prince?

Stephen Fry: Have you never had one of those eMails?

Colin Lane: No, actually, I don't.

Stephen Fry: Oh, of course, because Australian Internet connection is so slow, you probably don't even get eMails. You certainly can't download movies or anything. [Colin gets up to leave] I mean, I love the country: it's not your fault.

Alan Davies: He's only going over there, because that's the only place he can get Wi-Fi.

Colin Lane: [Mocking Stephen] "I love the country, but I do love so much to hang shit on it, as much as I possibly can..."

Stephen Fry: They deliberately use spelling mistakes and use bad grammar. Why would they do that?

Alan Davies: To attract Australians?

[Colin starts throwing things at Alan - gets up to throw mimic throwing his chair]

Stephen Fry: We already know what Australians are like at losing things. We've known 3 times out of 4.

[Audience applauds]

Colin Lane: What's the most recent result?

Stephen Fry: OK, we'll take 3 out of 4.

Stephen Fry: Describe the aviation techniques of the concrete arrows.

Alan Davies: Concrete can’t really fly, Stephen, can they, cos it’s very heavy.

Stephen Fry: Well, are you saying a jumbo jet isn’t heavy?

Alan Davies: [After a pause.] Good point.

Stephen Fry: People forget London was on steam in the same way that it was on gas and is now on electricity, and on the broadband, as it were.

Colin Lane: How do you spell that? Broadband? B-R- Broadband. [Pretends to write in down.]

Stephen Fry: Even more of a military leader.

Alan Davies: Not Hitler.

Stephen Fry: Adolf, as you rightly say, Hit-, as you pointed out, -ler.

Series M

Episode M.01 "A Medley of Maladies"

Stephen Fry: What did Typhoid Mary die of?

Alan Davies: Oh, don’t start.

Stephen Fry: Actually, Ross got it straight away.

Ross Noble: Shut your face.

Stephen Fry: What's the most dangerous thing you can find in doctors waiting rooms?

Matt Lucas: Ah, a copy of the Daily Telegraph.

[turns out the answer is a teddy bear]

Stephen Fry: It sounds odd, but a bear can't be wiped down.

Alan Davies: You've tried.

Stephen Fry: You can, obviously...

Alan Davies: You've wiped down a lot of bears, come on Stephen.

Matt Lucas: Now we know why it's called Winnie the Pooh

Ross Noble: It's really called Winnie the Filthy Shit.

Stephen Fry: 13.5% of hard toys...

Alan Davies: Don't google that whatever you do. Don't google hard toys. Don't google wiping down bears.

Ross Noble: Certainly no Winnie the Filthy Shit.

Stephen Fry: Who's having sex on your face right now?

Alan Davies: Bacteria. [To Lucy Porter] It’s usually bacteria, so go with me on this one.

[On the face mites Demodex ]

Stephen Fry: They have no anuses.

Alan Davies: Ooohh, thank God for that!

Stephen Fry: Unfortunately Alan, unfortunately, the fact they have no anuses, means that when they die, a whole life time of waste is deposited on your face. That is what happens...

Ross Noble: Is this 14% of waste you can see?

Stephen Fry: No. But what...

Ross Noble: That's a lovely tan you've got there Stephen...

[On why British children have the best teeth on Earth.]

Matt Lucas: That we have less filings, maybe that's because we don't go to the dentist at all.

Stephen Fry: Fewer fillings.

Matt Lucas: Fewer fillings...

Stephen Fry: I'm being very silly.

Matt Lucas: Stephen?

Stephen Fry: Yes?

Matt Lucas: Knock, knock.

Stephen Fry: Who's there?

Matt Lucas: To.

Stephen Fry: To who?

Matt Lucas: No, it's "To whom?".

Episode M.02 "Military Matters"

Jimmy Carr: Here's the thing about Hitler: History judges him very harshly. But he did kill Hitler.

Sheila Hancock: I know some actors who pretended to be gay to get out of conscription.

Stephen Fry: I've known more actors who pretended to be straight...

Stephen Fry: According to one contemporary report, 171,000 British troops visited the brothels in one street in Le Havre in just one year.

Jimmy Carr: Makes you proud, doesn't it?

Stephen Fry: How do all-female battles differ from all-male battles?

Alan Davies: They tidy up afterwards.

Stephen Fry: In Scouting for Boys...

Jimmy Carr: Sorry? Your hobby?

[Discussing Punt Guns]

Jeremy Clarkson: [To Alan Davies] I know you're a Vegetablist, which is fine. What I don't understand about these is if you actually hit a duck it vaporised it. And apart from licking the lake or the grass there's no nutritional value from an atomised layer.

Alan Davies: Cadiz is pronounced Cardiff, by the way. If you say Cardiff you're much closer to the way the Spanish say it.

Episode M.03 "M-Places"

[In the first question, Sami Shah sets off a klaxon.]

Stephen Fry: You're new to QI and I'd like to be merciful. But I'm not going to be.

Sami Shah: Alright, fair enough.

[The panel is given names of places, one of which is made up]

David Mitchell: In a sense all names are made up, aren't they?

David Mitchell: It's really difficult to name a place after yourself, isn't it?

Stephen Fry: Yup, it is.

David Mitchell: The thing to do as an explorer is to get there and then ask your assistant explorers if they can think of a name while reminding them of how they got the job.

[On Mesak Settafet ]

Stephen Fry: It is known to contain more tools than any other place on Earth.

Sue Perkins: Apart from Made in Chelsea.

Stephen Fry:I don't want to make hasty judgements about Pakistan, but...you’ve got the Taliban, hello?

Sami Shah: Yeah, but other than them, it's nice.

Alan Davies: But Stephen, the Naan! The Naan!

[On how to eat a mango]

Sami Shah: There is no dignity. Mangoes are like lobsters. You cannot look cool and eat a mango. You have to decide I'm eating the mango or I'm getting laid tonight.

Stephen Fry: I'm very proud to be part of a show where we can spend 10 minutes discussing a mango.

Stephen Fry: Alaska's state motto is North to the future. Don't know what that means, but there it is. They all have mottoes, these states, My favourite one is Kentucky. Kentucky's known, really, for two things.

Sue Perkins: Fried Chicken.

Stephen Fry: Well, apart from that. It's called The Bluegrass State, but it's Bourbon and The Kentucky Derby - the race. And somebody came up with a two-word phrase for Kentucky which encapsulates both those things which I think is rather brilliant.

Sue Perkins: Pissed Horses?

Stephen Fry: That would do it. No, it's Unbridled Spirit. Isn't that clever? Genuinely clever.

David Mitchell: Yeah. No, that's great. That absolutely shits on North to the Future.

Stephen Fry: [Laughing] It does, doesn't it? It's got to be said.

David Mitchell: Because if there's one place you do not want to head north from, it's Alaska. 'Cause there's fuck all of the world there. You want to go south! You want to see stuff... North to the Future maybe you'd say from Argentina.

Stephen Fry: Who gets the most use out of a man engine?

Alan Davies: A woman. [Laughter] Can't believe that [the forfeit klaxon] didn't go off.

Stephen Fry: Do you want to know what the forfeit was? [Deep voice] 'You do, Stephen.' I said, 'No! No-one's going to say that.' And you didn't.

Sue Perkins: We’ve moved beyond.

Stephen Fry: What are the three most manly games?

[After "Rugby" and "Boxing" triggered the forfeit klaxon]

Alan Davies: It's not gonna be Tiddlywinks isn't it?

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - TIDDLYWINKS]

Stephen Fry: C is ultrapure water.

Sue Perkins: Can I have C?

Stephen Fry: That’s your choice?

Sue Perkins: Oh. No.

[Forfeit klaxon goes off – ULTRAPURE]

David Mitchell: To be fair, we don't know whether Sue meant C as in C or C as in sea.

Stephen Fry: You little devil.

[On the taste of ultrapure water ]

David Mitchell: It does taste like water, but a little bit more boring.

Stephen Fry: There are lots of places in the UK named after mammaries. Can you name one?

Alan Davies: Boob Town.

Stephen Fry: [Laughing.] Boob Town? Can you name a real one?

Sue Perkins: Great Tit-chfield.

Alan Davies: The Mountains of Boob.

Sue Perkins: [Laughing.] The Mountains of Boob.

Episode M.04 "Miscellany"

Alan Davies: I haven't understood any of the words so far.

Stephen Fry: Macerating, what do you think that means?

Alan Davies: No, I don't know. Something you do in the garden, I'd've thought.

Stephen Fry: No, that's masturbating.

Rhod Gilbert: You clearly have a much more private garden than I've got.

Stephen Fry: Which place in the world beginning with M holds the worlds deadest parties?

Alan Davies: Milton Keynes.

[On the Ordovician-Silurian extinction caused by moss]

Stephen Fry: There is a moss that destroys itself: Kate Moss

[Later]

Stephen Fry: Bitchin' about lichen.

Stephen Fry: Bicycling did cause a lot of men to get rather angry and concerned about the fact that women were doing it. Do you know the reason?

Cariad Lloyd: Cos they were free. They were allowed to move.

Stephen Fry: Yes. Exactly.

Cariad Lloyd: If they move, what else are they gonna do? Vote? Think? Be allowed on panel shows? No! We’ve got to stop this! It’s dangerous.

Noel Fielding: I like the idea of the man coming home early from work and the wife’s in bed with a bicycle.

Alan Davies: [About the klaxon.] Why weren’t things going off then? If I’d said things, it would all have gone off!

Rhod Gilbert: Finally you’ve worked out the pattern.

Alan Davies: Whenever you guessing things, it goes off! That’s how it works. Just cos she’s a girl.

Stephen Fry: Oh, now.

Cariad Lloyd: Aw, she’s a girl who knew the right answer.

Stephen Fry: Who invented the motorway?

Alan Davies: Mr. Way.

Episode M.05 "Maths"

Stephen Fry: Last night, I tossed two heads at the same time...[general facepalming]

[On America]

Sandi Toksvig: This is also the country where nine out of ten high-school graduates think Joan of Arc was Noah's wife, so...

[Stephen has just performed a magic card-out of a bag trick]

Sandi Toksvig: It's like Paul Daniels was in the room.

Alan Davies: He was in the bag.

Sandi Toksvig: I suffer from a fatal condition Aisling, which is: posh voice, no money.

Sandi Toksvig: I don't think it's possible to come on this programme and not discuss the penis.

Stephen Fry: Not while I've got breath in my body, Sandi

Episode M.06 "Marriage and Mating"

Stephen Fry: So it is the species that most has to be utterly motionless during sex that we've discovered.

Jo Brand: Is it nuns?

[On consummation of marriage by proxy ]

Jo Brand: I think they had to check them, medically, beforehand because they didn't want a poxy proxy.

Stephen Fry: Many supposedly monogamous birds have a tit on the side.

Episode M.07 "Middle Muddle"

Alan Davies: I've never had, in 14 years, people eating sweets in the front row.

Stephen Fry: What the hell?

Alan Davies: And now I can't think about anything else!

[Jimmy Carr gets up, takes the bag of sweets from the audience member, hands it to Alan and returns to his seat]

Stephen Fry: You can have them back at the end of the lesson!

Jimmy Carr: I feel really bad for those people. 'Cause, obviously, you're just sat there watching an episode of QI and then, suddenly, the telly gets up and nicks your sweets!

[Discussing Midlife Crises]

Danny Bhoy: I went to my Doctor and I said "I hate The West and want all the infidels dead." He said "Don't worry, you're going through a mid-life ISIS."

Jimmy Carr: The awkward thing about midlife crises is I've had some friends that have gone through them recently. They've left their partners, gone out with much younger women and bought sports cars. And the most difficult thing is pretending to my other half! "Aw, that's terrible! Isn't it sad?"

[After being asked a question, Jimmy tries to answer, but Aisling hits her buzzer at the same time causing him to stop.]

Aisling Bea: No, keep going. Does this buzzer stop Jimmy speaking? Try again?

Jimmy Carr: I was just gonna say to...

[Aisling hits her buzzer again and Jimmy stops abruptly.]

Jimmy Carr: I find the buzzers really disconcerting. It does feel like somebody’s about to get murdered.

Jimmy Carr: [On Stephen's 'posh' accent.] I know you think you’re doing a voice, but that is how you talk.

Stephen Fry: You're a beast.

Stephen Fry: Silver’s not a colour, no.

Jimmy Carr: Oh, I love this show.

Stephen Fry: It’s midsummer in the UK. To the nearest hour, what time does day become night?

Alan Davies: 10?

[Forfeit klaxon goes off – 10PM]

Alan Davies: I was gonna say 1.

[Forfeit klaxon goes off – 1AM]

Jimmy Carr: Is it..? I’m only saying this, I’ve got no rationale at all, is it noon? Because it’s always something weird on this show. ‘Oh no, it’s actually night time in the middle of the day. You’re all idiots, you’ve been doing it wrong.’

Stephen Fry: In midsummer, there is no night in Britain.

Alan Davies: There’s no night. There’s no night, Danny. [Runs a hand over his face.]

Stephen Fry: It’s constant twilight.

Alan Davies: Oh, bollocks. It gets dark. [Runs both hands over his face.]

Jimmy Carr: Constant Twilight sounds like a really good indie album.

Stephen Fry: It does, doesn’t it?

Stephen Fry: When is the best time to charge your mobile phone?

Alan Davies: At night!

Stephen Fry: That’s good. Yeah. Might be.

Alan Davies: Oh, really? I thought that would go off. ‘There is no night, you fool!’

Episode M.08 "Merriment"

[Alan is in a horse costume.]

Alan Davies: Can I say, I don’t think we’re getting the best out of my costume.

Stephen Fry: Show the ladies and gentlemen.

Alan Davies: Look, I’ve got a tail. And I’ve got feet and everything. And it’s all out of sight below the desk, Stephen.

Stephen Fry: Now, the queen has a Christmas message, as do we. In fact, as we approach the end of series 13, it’s time for us to reveal every episode of QI, every single one, since the very first, has included a secret message which nobody has spotted. Where is it hidden?

Bill Bailey: Is it on your face? Have you just encrypted some delightful laughter lines into some... perhaps it’s in Klingon. Merry Christmas.

Stephen Fry: It’s not on my face.

[In response to the www.alan0andstephenhero.com hidden in the theme tune, Alan is hiding under his horse mask when a sudden noise happens.]

Bill Bailey: What the hell was that?

Jenny Eclair: It’s a light.

Alan Davies: Was it a lamp?

Johnny Vegas: No, he’s got a bad ankle. I’m just taking him out. I can’t afford to keep him, okay?

Alan Davies: I absolutely shat myself.

Stephen Fry: Absolutely shat yourself, my god.

Stephen Fry: Now, who’s the worst person to sit next to at a silent movie?

[Alan burps.]

Bill Bailey: Alan Davies.

Episode M.09 "Messing With Your Mind"

Stephen Fry: How much sleep does a paradoxical insomniac get?

Tommy Tiernan: Paradoxical... lots?

Stephen Fry: Well, yes. He does.

Alan Davies: More than he thinks.

Stephen Fry: Yes.

Tommy Tiernan: It’s like a paradoxical kleptomaniac who leaves things in shops.

Josh Widdicombe: Anyone who takes photographs at a concert should be thrown out. Out of the country.

Tommy Tiernan: You definitely have a man-cave, the question is: do you have two?

Sarah Millikan: ...no...?!

Josh Widdicombe: I didn't have many toys when I grew up.

Stephen Fry: Your body is a wonderful toy...

Stephen Fry: In a war between the grass and the grass-eaters, who wins?

Josh Widdicombe: The grass...

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - THE GRASS]

Josh Widdicombe: ...eaters.

Stephen Fry: You said the grass-eaters? Thank you.

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - THE GRASS-EATERS]

Stephen Fry: At school, if we were going on a dawn raid or something like that, they’d say...

Josh Widdicombe: Sorry?

Stephen Fry: Do a raid on the kitchens and steal jelly and things.

Josh Widdicombe: I forgot you grew up in an Enid Blyton novel. To get your catapult back from the teacher?

Stephen Fry: My dormitory at school had a milkshake club, but we won't go into that.

Josh Widdicombe: It wasn't all like Enid Blyton, wasn't it?

Episode M.10 "Making a Meal of It"

Stephen Fry: There was a story that Alan may remember of Darwin and giant...

Alan Davies: Oh, yeah. Didn’t they all get eaten on the boat?

Stephen Fry: Yeah, they were so delicious, that’s the point.

Phill Jupitus: Wouldn’t it be brilliant if the Origin of Species just halfway through turned into a cookbook. ‘I am basically putting to you all, members of the Royal Society, everything is bloody delicious.’

Stephen Fry: The Purple Emperor Butterfly likes to start its day with rancid pickled mudfish, Thai poi shrimp paste, and big cock shrimp paste. Mmm.

Phill Jupitus: What are you, 12?

Stephen Fry: Come on. When will the phrase ‘big cock shrimp paste’ not be funny?

Stephen Fry: You're gonna have to have a point for that.

Alan Davies: I'm at plus one, I'm not gonna speak again.

Phill Jupitus: [To Stephen] The idea of you at the microwave...

Stephen Fry: I had to do it on TV-dramas...

Phill Jupitus: “I was playing a rough type.”

[On microwaves]

Alan Davies: Now we got one that goes beep, beep, beep...

Phill Jupitus: That's your food slowly reversing out of the kitchen.

Stephen Fry: That is the miracle of Kangaroo suckling. Who do you think, of all the animals, has...

Phill Jupitus: [Bursts out laughing] Sorry, this is the only show where I hear sentences like that.

Stephen Fry: Who would like to see some Milky Magic?

[General merriment]

Phill Jupitus: [To the audience] If Stephen says that to you in the Park, say no!

Stephen Fry: [Produces props] Mmm, lovely milky things.

Phill Jupitus: STOP SAYING THAT!

Stephen Fry: [To Alan] Cariad has been bitten by a snake.

Cariad Lloyd: What's happening to me? This is not I'm a Celebrity!

Stephen Fry: What should you do?

Alan Davies: Suck her.

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - SUCK OUT THE VENOM]

Cariad Lloyd: You can't afford it, love.

Stephen Fry: Even when you've been bitten, you're gonna haggle prices?

Alan Davies: You soon drop your prices once you've tried it.

Episode M.11 "Menagerie"

Stephen Fry: The Maribou Stork is often given the label The Ugliest Bird in the Animal Kingdom.

Sue Perkins: That's not fair.

Stephen Fry: OK, name an uglier one.

Alan Davies: Oh, don't make me say it!

Stephen Fry: [Firmly] No!

Alan Davies: Edwina Currie.

Stephen Fry: So we’re criticising Hitler now, are we?

Bill Bailey: The more I hear about him the less I like him.

Stephen Fry: How many legs does a kangaroo have?

Alan Davies: Oh, don’t say any numbers. Just don’t say any numbers.

[On how you titillate an ocelot]

Stephen Fry: You oscillate its tits a lot.

Episode M.12 "Medieval and Macabre"

Stephen Fry: When do you think, I’ll give you five years either way, was the first airline stewardess?

David Mitchell: I think 200 years before the first aeroplane. I think it was a weird, pointless scheme by a futurologist. Just went up and down a field with a trolley asking the cattle, ‘drink, sir?’

Alan Davies: I think the question is flawed.

Stephen Fry: How so?

Alan Davies: Because if I’d had my dirt-hole burgled without my knowledge, I wouldn’t know about it, would I?

Stephen Fry: Touché. You’re absolutely right.

Alan Davies: So, I don’t know.

Stephen Fry: Is the right answer.

Alan Davies: Possibly.

Alan Davies: My favourite one from the Spanish Inquisition was, they'd put a pole up your anus and they put it in such a way that it avoids all your vital organs and comes out by your shoulder and then they just leave you there for people to look at.

Matt Lucas: I like the first part of that.

Stephen Fry: The one thing you could do at home is you could do is take a foaming beer and then pop a bit of earwax into the head of your foaming tankard and then the foam should collapse.

Matt Lucas: If you're watching TV, don't listen to this man.

Episode M.13 "Monster Mash"

Stephen Fry: People think, you know, sailors fall in love with mermaids, and how can they consummate their relationship?

Alan Davies: Fertilise the eggs, Stephen.

Stephen Fry: Exactly, it’s very simple. She lays her eggs on a rock or something, and you go and fertilise them. What’s the problem?

Phill Jupitus: The sailor has to sail back to his waters where he was spawned, and take the mermaid with him. So he has to go back to, I don’t know, Dorking, find a pond, pop his new fish-wife in there.

Josh Widdicombe: Fish-wife!

Phill Jupitus: She lays her eggs, and then he has to be arrested for indecent public exposure at a boating pond.

Stephen Fry: Why do great white sharks bite people?

Sara Pascoe: To keep themselves in the news.

Episode M.14 "Messy"

[After a discussion on muffs the Audience is laughing at the innuendo]

Alan Davies: [To the Audience] Can you just control yourselves?!

Stephen Fry: [To Alan] You've got a nerve!

Alan Davies: I haven't said anything about the vagina for four minutes!

Stephen Fry: What are meerkats a type of?

Alan Davies: They’re a type of meer. Or possibly a type of cat.

Stephen Fry: How can I tell the age of this tree?

Alan Davies: Chop it down.

Sarah Millican: Yeah, count the rings.

[The klaxon goes off – ‘count the rings’]

Sarah Millican: Is that not right?

Stephen Fry: Well, not really, no. It’s a sort of rough guide, but it doesn’t really tell you...

Sarah Millican: Well it’s a rough guide. Maybe that’s all I’m after. Maybe I’m not all that bothered about accuracy, Stephen. Maybe I’ve got shit to do.

Stephen Fry: What colour is the sun?

Noel Fielding: I’ve heard it’s green.

Stephen Fry: Not bad.

Noel Fielding: Tartan?

Stephen Fry: Oh, you were doing so well. Tartan.

Episode M.15 "Mix and Match"

Stephen Fry: When the universe was created...

Alan Davies: 4000 years ago.

Stephen Fry: 4000 years ago as it says in the bible.

Alan Davies: By our lord.

Stephen Fry: Only two elements were created at that time.

Alan Davies: Gold and silver.

Jo Brand: Frankincense and myrrh.

Stephen Fry: They are still the most abundant elements in the universe. 99% of the universe is composed of...

Bill Bailey: Helium and sarcasm.

Stephen Fry: How many human beings would you need to extract gold from before you could make of them a gold coin?

James Acaster: Just Mr T.

Jo Brand: Are some people made of heavy metal?

Alan Davies: Lemmy.

Stephen Fry: [To James Acaster] What's NuMetal?

James Acaster: It was rap and metal together. It went very badly.

Stephen Fry: How many paintings did Vincent van Gogh sell which he was alive.

Jo Brand: [To Alan.] Don’t say none.

Bill Bailey: None. I’m gonna say none.

[The klaxon goes off – ‘none’]

Stephen Fry: Really, I’m afraid...

Bill Bailey: One.

Alan Davies: A few, maybe.

[The klaxon goes off – ‘one’]

Stephen Fry: It was lots, he sold hundreds of paintings.

Alan Davies: Hundreds?!

Stephen Fry: Yeah. When he was 15, he used to work in an art gallery.

Alan Davies: Oh, shut up.

Stephen Fry: It’s true. I just asked you how many paintings...

Alan Davies: This is the closest I’ve come to walking out of this show.

Episode M.16 "Misconceptions"

Stephen Fry: Alan’s buzzer?

[Alan presses it, it’s a buzzard. The klaxon goes off – ‘buzzard’.]

Stephen Fry: That wasn’t a buzzer, that was a buzzard.

Alan Davies: That’s harsh, though.

Stephen Fry: It is harsh.

Alan Davies: Am I on minus then already? That is a new record.

Stephen Fry: I have no... My hands are tied.

Stephen Fry: If we were on a direct flight from Madrid to Montana, which American states beginning with M would we fly over on the way?

Chris Addison: ‘Merica? Is that one?

[Showing the distance between Madrid and Montana on a globe. Chris is struggling.]

Stephen Fry: Are you wrestling with the world, here?

Chris Addison: Aren’t we all, Stephen?

Stephen Fry: How did the first American Air Mail arrive at its destination?

Chris Addison: Human cannonball. They put a post man in a cannon and fired him.

Stephen Fry: What is the best way to do a massive data dump?

Chris Addison: Give your laptop to a British civil servant.

Stephen Fry: The church excommunicated all mimes in the 5th century

Alan Davies: Not a moment too soon.

Series N

Episode N.01 Naming Names

Alan Davies: When they say “the police are quizzing the suspect”, that's wrong, isn't it?

Sandi Toksvig: No, that's from inquisitive and inquisition. That's a separate...

Alan Davies: You're good, you've got it. You're on the right chair. [points to himself] Got this cold feeling right there.

Sandi Toksvig: Name the cause of the first mass extinction.

Alan Davies: Oh, now, that is a trick one. You're trying to do us the dinosaur one, but there was the one before that...

Phill Jupitus: After fourteen years, he understands the format.

Sandi Toksvig: [On the subject of feet] I consider them the frayed edges of the body.

[Alan has answered several questions in a row correctly]

Romesh Ranganathan: What's going on with you today? Suddenly you know shit.

Alan Davies: Substandard panel, really.

Episode N.02 North Norse

[On a vodka ice bar in Norway]

Sandi Toksvig: Fantastic experience. As far as I can remember.

[On Kim Jong-un]

Rhod Gilbert: He looks like a cross between a Bond villain and Augustus Gloop.

Sandi Toksvig: Have you been to America?

Lucy Beaumont: Yeah.

Sandi Toksvig: Which parts have you been?

Lucy Beaumont: All over.

Sandi Toksvig: Well, that doesn't narrow it down for me.

Sandi Toksvig: What is the worst thing that doggers ever experienced?

Rhod Gilbert: Child locks.

Alan Davies: A MILT is a Mum In Leather Trousers.

Sandi Toksvig: What is the second-best thing to come out of Denmark?

Alan Davies: It's you, Sandi.

Sandi Toksvig: And this week's winner is: Alan!

Episode N.03 Nosey Noisy

Sandi Toksvig: If I toot my horn and flash my lamps at exactly the same time, what is the first thing that you will notice?

Ross Noble: You've taken up dogging.

Sandi Toksvig: [After a moment of recovery] Every girl needs a hobby.

Episode N.04 Noble Rot

Sandi Toksvig: Name a nobleman who invented a hot drink you might enjoy with a hobnob.

Jeremy Clarkson: Coffee Annan.

[ Earl Grey tea not being named by the real Earl Grey ]

Sandi Toksvig: He was probably dead for 40 years before somebody came up with it.

Alan Davies:: Oh, like Jesus.

Jeremy Clarkson: Drunk duelling, I'd like to see that.

Jason Manford: I think you did that on series 16 of Top Gear.

Sandy Toksvig: There was one in 1892 which was a topless duel.

Alan Davies: Oh wow that's brilliant. w:Channel 5 wow.

Sandy Toksvig: Ah between Princess Metternich and Countess Kielmansegg and what I love about this; said to have been caused by a disagreement over a flower arrangement.

Alan Davies: What an excuse that sounds like Yeah well I don't like the flowers so get your top off...I'll duel you.

Jason Manford: I think you did that on series 16 of Top Gear.

Sarah Pascoe: Psst, I think Jeremy is listing swear words.

Jeremy Clarkson: I'm way past twenty.

Sandi Toksvig: Are you, darling?

Jason Manford: Press the red button now to see what they are.

Jeremy Clarkson: Please, no. Don't tell me there are vegan tattoo places. There are really?

Sarah Pascoe: Yes.

Jeremy Clarkson: That's 1200 words in the Sunday Times next week, right there.

Episode N.05 Not Nearly

Sandi Toksvig: One answer has a klaxon and one does not, that much I can give away.

Gyles Brandreth: Drugs are the making of the Olympics.

Sandi Toksvig: People have wine stoppers. What's the point of that?

Sandi Toksvig: The Official Monster Raving Loony Party in this country has proposed the creation of a 99 pence coin to save change.

Episode N.09 Noel

Susan Calman: You've got such a gaze, Sandi. It's like the Eye of Sauron.

Sandi Toksvig: What are “Spoon Licker”, “Doorway Sniffer”, “Sausage Swiper” and “Meat Hook”?

Josh Widdicombe: Is that how you refer to us four? [Laughter] If so, name names.

Susan Calman: If you'd had to describe us, Sandi, which one of us would be the “Sausage Swiper”?

Matt Lucas: [presses buzzer]

Sandi Toksvig: I was being so careful...

Episode N.09 Non Sequiturs

[Phill is trying to pour tea while wearing goggles that make him see everything upside down]

Sandi Toksvig: How do you feel?

Phill Jupitus: [strained voice] Glastonbury. 2000...

Episode N.11 Nonsense

Sandi Toksvig: [Quoting NewAge bullshit generator [3] ] “Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty”.

Phill Jupitus: “It's a Coldplay B-side, isn't it?”

[Later]

Sandi Toksvig: What's the worst noise in the world?

Phill Jupitus: I think I mentioned it before today: That would be Coldplay B-sides.

Sandi Toksvig: There were three divisions for swimming in my school: A, B and C. I was in F.

Alan Davies: F for floating?

Holly Walsh: It's like with people on YouTube squeezing spots. I mean, what is wrong with people?

Nish Kumar: What is wrong with your YouTube searches?

Phill Jupitus: […] I went to McLean in Texas where they have the barbed wire museum.

Nish Kumar: How do you get in?!

[ Stone houses on Easter island ]

Nish Kumar: I think I lived in London too long. Because I'm looking at that, thinking: Looks alright. 600 a month, yes, please.

Episode N.12 Noodles

Matt Lucas: It's cool but not as cool as Kanye.

Cariad Lloyd: It's cooler than Kanye.

Sandi Toksvig: I thought Kanye is something you cure with Yoghurt.

Episode N.13 Naval Navigation

[Regarding Tattoos]

Johnny Vegas: My brother got one, you know he tried for years to get it in a language that you don't understand so you won't mind if it's misspelled. “So, what's it mean?” “Honesty.”. And my mum walked in and he pulled his shirt up and just pretended he didn't have it.

Ronni Ancona: [On Royal Navy slang] The term for premature ejaculation is “getting off at Fratton”, because Fratton is the train station two before Portsmouth. Which is your final destination, really.

Sandi Toksvig: What am I an inch and a half taller than?

Jimmy Carr: The cast of Time Bandits.

Episode N.14 Numbers

[What is the loneliest number?]

Alan Davies: Three is the magic number

Sandi Toksvig: Three is the magic number. Well, so they say, I've never tried.

[On the number 8,000,000,085.]

Colin Lane: [To Sandi] OK, would it be a problem if you would explain that again?

Colin Lane: I was bullied a school. [Audience awwws] Yes. A kid stole my lunch money and gave me a wedgie and then I decided to give up teaching.

Sandi Toksvig: What can we do about the international poo shortage? [4]

[Later]

Colin Lane: So it's just animal number two's?

Sandi Toksvig: Yes...

Colin Lane: So we can't do out bit? [Gets up to go outside]

Sandi Toksvig: I don't know about Australia, but they have laws, here.

Colin Lane: [Sits back down] And I thought you were going to be different.

Sandi Toksvig: I am different, but you haven't looked closely enough.

Episode N.15 Next

Sandi Toksvig: Who has green sponge balls?

Audience member: Spongebob Square Pants

Sandi Toksvig: Aw...

[Forfeit Klaxon goes off: SPONGEBOB SQUARE PANTS]

Sandi Toksvig: That's why you're sitting over there...

[What kind of questions are barristers never allowed to ask a witness?]

Lucy Porter: Multiple choice.

Sandi Toksvig: And finally, a male black widow spider and a female black widow spider just finished having sex. What happens next?

Ross Noble: Tiny cigarette.

Episode N.16 New

Sandi Toksvig: There a some fantastic places in Newfoundland. Conception Bay South...

Jimmy Carr: Conception Bay South? Yeah, that's what I call it, she doesn't like it. She thinks it's too formal. 'Come on love, let's have a look at Conception Bay South.'

Clive Anderson: What about Conception Bay North?

Jimmy Carr: Well, that's a special treat for birthdays.

Sandi Toksvig: I remember I've been in Thailand for three weeks and I found a copy of the Daily Mail and there was this brilliant article in it by Norman Tebbit and he said “I can't be the only person who noticed the rise in serious crime since same-sex-partnerships were brought in.” You can, Norman, you can be the only person.

[Sandi has produced a model of Newton's Cradle and set it in motion]

Sandi Toksvig: Right, my question is, who invented this?

Alan Davies: Isn't it Winston Churchill?

Jimmy Carr: You were so epically wrong there, the buzzer didn't even went off.

Sandi Toksvig: I want it to be Winston Churchill.

Clive Anderson: We normally call it Newton's Balls, don't we?

Jimmy Carr: I think Newton's Cradle would be…

Sandi Toksvig: I think Newton's Cradle…

Clive Anderson: I'm afraid I went to a rougher school than you.

Sandi Toksvig: I think, if Newton had that many balls, it's no wonder he discovered gravity.

Series O

Episode O.02 Organisms

[On otters sliding down a snowy decline]

Holly Walsh: Is that the remake of Cool Runnings?

Sandi Toksvig: What is the best job for a beetle?

Cariad Lloyd: Drummer, cause you'd still be alive.

Sandi Toksvig: I am giving you an extra point, even though it's horribly wrong.

Holly Walsh: Is it careers advisor?

Sandi Toksvig: Did you have one of those?

Holly Walsh: Yeah, they told me to be a horticulturist.

Cariad Lloyd: You had a nice careers advisor. Mine was like “ Sainsbury's that way, good luck”.

Nish Kumar: Mine told me “Prison”.

Sandi Toksvig: Working or serving?

[On Dik-Diks]

Sandi Toksvig: They have the driest poo and most concentrated urine of any ungulant.

Holly Walsh: Well, clearly they've never spent a night in Wetherspoons.

Sandi Toksvig: What is a zookeepers worst nightmare?

Nish Kumar: Planet of the Apes.

Holly Walsh: Was it out of the blue redundancies?

Holly Walsh: Little baby girls can have periods in their first months cause they take in your estrogen.

Sandi Toksvig: I did not know that.

Holly Walsh: Is that the first time you ever had that experience?

Sandi Toksvig: What?

Holly Walsh: Not knowing something.

Episode O.03 Oceans

Sandi Toksvig: Welcome to QI. Tonight [goes “blub blub blub, blub blub blub”] we are setting sail... [Laughter]...I do all me own effects.

Sandi Toksvig: Right. We start with “How many oceans are there on Earth?”

Joe Lycett: [Points to screen showing six images of the sea] Six, I can count them.

[Forfeit klaxon “6”]

Joe Lycett: First time on this show...

Sandi Toksvig: Right into that trap.

[On what's the most scary thing about sharks]

David Mitchell: The teeth.

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - TEETH]

David Mitchell: The fact that they can't go backwards. [looks around confused, then, angrily:] I'm sorry, that takes a bit long to type!

[Forfeit klaxon goes off - WRONG]

[On Aerial fish re-stocking]

David Mitchell: Every one of those fish has a JustGiving page.

David Mitchell: Why isn't there actually a fish that lives in trees or on the land, cause, there's, you know, there are penguins which live in the sea and mammals that live in the sea. Why hasn't a fish had the gumption to start living like a rabbit?

Sandi Toksvig: I think it's lack of ambition.

David Mitchell: Bats! Bats are mammals, they can fly...it just doesn't make sense. The fish aren't trying.

Sandi Toksvig: No. I think what you need to do is to start diving and give those fish a good talking to.

David Mitchell: I wouldn't need to dive if there were fish running on [drowned out by laughter]

Sandi Toksvig: The mangrove killifish lives on land.

David Mitchell: Well done!

Episode O.04 Over and ova

Sandi Toksvig: I was in Sydney and I was listening to the radio and they said: :[Australian accent] “And now the weather: There's no weather today.”

Sandi Toksvig: I once had waitress in Los Angeles as I…

Alan Davies: [suggestively] Did you, now?

Episode O.05 Odorous and odious

Sandi Toksvig: And Alan's buzzer goes...

[ Alan presses his buzzer, which emits a farting sound]

Nish Kumar: Even on a show as high-brow as this, that is still funny.

Sandi Toksvig: How do you measure the unpleasantness of a smell?

Nish Kumar: I mean I don't know, but I once did a fart that was so bad my da- I didn't own up to it – and my dad went and got the yellow pages out and he was looking for the number of a plumber because he thought a sewage pipe had leaked.

Sandi Toksvig: Whose social media is little more than an odious pile of crap?

Nish Kumar: Is that a trick question? Cause isn't everyone's…

Sandi Toksvig: The Epicureans said that truffles smell like the tussled sheets on a brothel bed.

Sandi Toksvig: We have some actual truffles here [hands out plates with bits of truffles]

Ross Noble: [surreptitiously empties his plate into his shirt pocket]

[On the fact that most of virgin olive oil is adulterated]

Ross Noble: They should have on the extra virgin oil stuff, like, in brackets “May contain slag.”

[Sandi has been awarding scratch and sniff stickers for quite interesting answers]

Nish Kumar: I cannot wait to see the Swedish version of Sherlock where he goes: “ [sniff, sniff] It's smellementary, my dear Watson.” [To the applauding audience] Hey, come on! Yes!

Sandi Toksvig: Has he got any sticker? No, then I'd ask for them back.

Episode O.06 Odds and Ends

[ Sandi has handed out an odd gadget, wanting to know what you open with it]

Alan Davies: A safe? A suitcase? Your heart?

[Later]

Alan Davies: And also you can measure the girth of your penis. [Hands gadget to Romesh ] You can measure the length of yours with that.

Sandi Toksvig: HOW DID WE GET THERE SO QUICKLY!?

[On which train the Murder on the Orient Express took place]

Sandi Toksvig: Well, what is the full name of the one where the murder took place, then?

Matt Lucas: We were thinking of the one where it took place! We don't have to say the name of this train. We just, all of us, demand the points!

Matt Lucas: : Is there WiFi or 3G on the Orient Express? That, for me, is generally the...

Romesh Ranganathan: That's what they meant: There's no WiFi. It is murder on the Orient Express.

[On a list of obscure organs in animals]

Lisa Tarbuck: Do you have a smart vagina?

Sandi Toksvig: Erm, it's terribly tidy. [beat] I have a woman in, twice a week. [High-fives Lisa Tarbuck]

[On Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo Bear being basically thieves]

Alan Davies: In the first episode someone could've just come in and shot them.

Romesh Ranganathan: [Imitating Yogi Bear] Boo-Boo! It's getting dark! I'm loosing blood, Boo-Boo!

Alan Davies: [Imitating Boo-Boo Bear] Don't go to sleep, Yogi! Don't go to sleep!

Romesh Ranganathan: [Imitating Yogi Bear] I don't think I'm gonna make it, Boo-Boo! I can see a great big pic-a-nic basket in the sky, Boo-Boo!

Episode O.07 Opposites

[ Alan's buzzer goes “In, Out, In, Out, Shake It All About” Slade, Okey kokey ]

Jimmy Carr: Very base level Kamasutra, there.

[“store scum” being an anagram of “customers”, audience claps enthusiastically]

Alan Davies: [points towards audience] There's a few people out there work retail.

Sara Pascoe: Seriously, there are all these people doing downward dogs...

Sandi Toksvig: I'm going to stop you right there.

[On the screens is an image of a hedgehog which has lost its spines, audience goes awwww]

Alan Davies: [on the audience's reaction] Oh, you really got this one bad, haven't you? [goes: awww, awww] One spineless hedgehog and you lose it. Sums this country up, if you ask me.

Sandi Toksvig: What is the opposite of a plant eating sheep?

Sara Pascoe: A sheep that grows plants.

Sandi Toksvig: See, just when I thought what I said was really clear…

Jimmy Carr: You sound like a vegan who's really hungry.

Sandi Toksvig: The opposite of a plant eating sheep would be a…?

Colin Lane: A sheep eating plant.

Sandi Toksvig: Yes!

Sara Pascoe: Well done, Colin.

Colin Lane: [triumphantly basks in the applause of the audience]

Sandi Toksvig: Colin, I said in the beginning the more you get wrong, the more points you get. I don't know if that's...

Colin Lane: I've been on this show six or seven times and I still don't know what the rules are.

Jimmy Carr: There is a penis for sale in London...

Sandi Toksvig: Sorry?

Jimmy Carr: There is a very strange store in the East End in London. And the last man to be hanged in England, ah, they have his penis and it's for sale.

Sandi Toksvig: How much is it?

Sara Pascoe: And was he hung?

Sandi Toksvig: We have all this nuclear waste stinking the place up instead of keeping it all underground why don't we do the opposite, fire it all at the sun and forget about it?

Jimmy Carr: [exasperated] I only just started recycling.

Colin Lane: If we fired it all at The Sun, wouldn't Rupert Murdock be upset?

Sandi Toksvig: Suddenly it seems like a good idea.

Episode O.08 Operations

Bill Bailey: Phantom leg itch, yeah. What about if you got two legs and got, like, a phantom third leg?

Sandi Toksvig: That's what every boy thinks he's got.

Sandi Toksvig: Some of these “Bills of Mortality”, they just had cause of death “suddenly”.

Rhod Gilbert: Forced air? I never heard the term. I'm forty…??? late forties. I'm not gonna bother sitting here working it out. I'm fifty soon, I never heard the term forced...well, not in that context.

Sandi Toksvig: I love the fact, Rhod, that I'm asking you some quite complicated science question and you don't know how old you are.

Rhod Gilbert: [scribbles] I'm about forty nine.

Sandi Toksvig: Have you just worked it out?

Rhod Gilbert: Yeah. [laughter] I'm so used to saying “I'm fifty in a few years”, I'm so used to saying that, that for a moment...

Sandi Toksvig: [to Rhod Gilbert] The thing is though, it is quite good to know how old you are and the producer just told me in my ear that you are forty eight.

[Later]

Rhod Gilbert: What are we talking about?

Sandi Toksvig: Hidden. Underwater cables.

Rhod Gilbert: Oh, yeah.

Sandi Toksvig: You're forty eight!

[In relation to Ivy Bells ]

Rhod Gilbert: Spying was a lot more hassle in those days. Now all you need is somebody's maiden name and their pet's name and you're off.

Alan Davies: If you're a Russian you just have to go and see Donald Trump and ask him.

Rhod Gilbert: I've been to the bottom of the sea.

Katherine Ryan: Really? What's down there?

Rhod Gilbert: My feet.

Sandi Toksvig: Which part of the body was used to stop the Netherlands flooding in 1953?

Bill Bailey: Somebody put their finger in a dike!

[Forfeit klaxon: “Finger”]

Sandi Toksvig: No, we mentioned on QI before, the story of a Dutch boy sticking his finger in a dike is a myth. What other body-part might you stick into a hole to st…[general tittering]

Alan Davies: The penis.

[Forfeit klaxon: “Penis”]

Alan Davies: I sucked into that.

Sandi Toksvig: I can categorically tell you, no dyke needs a penis.

External links

Wikipedia

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QI

QI quotes at the Internet Movie Database