For those who don't know, QI is a BBC gameshow - but one with a difference.
The answers to some of the questions are not what most people think they are. Some of the questions seem to be simple and straightforward and are questions which most people seem to know the answers to. But if one of the four celebrity contestants (one of whom, the actor Alan Davies, is on the show permanently) gives the obvious answer to a question a klaxon rings out to indicate that they are wrong. And you are thinking: "Hang on, he got it right! Everybody knows the answer to that question."
Then Stephen Fry - who played Melchett in Blackadder - explains the answer. So rather than him just giving the answer he tells you in detail about the answer, so you learn a lot. And you learn that many of the things you thought are true, aren't.
However, not all the questions are those which you always thought you knew the answer. However, they are usually Quite Interesting questions (QI).
Here are some examples of the types of questions which appear on QI which you THOUGHT you knew the answers to but didn't:
Stephen Fry: "How many wives did Henry VIII have?"
Contestant: "Six!"
Fry: "No, he didn't."
Contestant: Yes, he did. Everyone knows that!"
Fry: "Henry’s fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves was annulled. This is very different from divorce. Legally, it means the marriage never took place.
The Pope declared Henry’s second marriage to Anne Boleyn illegal, because the King was still married to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Henry, as head of the new Church of England, declared that his first marriage was invalid on the legal grounds that a man could not sleep with his brother’s widow.
Depending on whether you believe the Pope or the King, this brings it down to either four or three marriages.
Henry also annulled his marriage to Anne Boleyn, just before he had her executed for adultery. He did the same with his fifth wife, Catherine Howard. All the evidence suggests that she was unfaithful to him before and during their marriage. This time, Henry passed a special Act making it treasonable for a queen to commit adultery. Once again, he also had the marriage annulled.
So that makes four annulments, and only two incontestably legal marriages."
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Fry: "What colour tights did Robin Hood wear?"
Contestant: "Green!"
Fry: "You are wrong, I'm afraid."
Contestant: "Well, I always thought they were green. It's in the movies!"
Fry: "The earliest Robin Hood stories were ballads dating from the 15th century. In the longest of these, A Gest of Robyn Hode, Robin and his ‘mery men’ wear ‘a good mantell of scarlet and raye’, a kind of striped bright red wrap. In others, Robin wears red while his men wear green.
This reflects his status as leader – ‘scarlet’ was the most expensive cloth in Medieval England, dyed using kermes, the dried bodies of the female shield louse (Kermes ilicis). This also explains the name Robin – from the Latin robus, ‘red’ – and that of one of his closest associates: Will Scarlet.
Historians now think the ballads may have been written for the Livery Guilds, companies of merchants involved in manufacturing, and that the real point of the Robin Hood stories wasn’t the traditional ‘forest versus town’ or ‘rich versus poor’ battle, but the victory of the merchant adventurer over the failing, corrupt nobility.
Robin Hood, dressed in his expensive red cloth, was really the champion of the emerging middle-classes rather than the poor."
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Fry: "Which war killed the highest proportion of British soldiers?"
Contestant: "Either WWI or WWII."
Fry: "No. I'm afraid that's wrong."
Contestant: "Are you telling me that there was a deadlier war for British soldiers than WWI or WWII? Don't be stupid!"
Fry: "During the English Civil War, between 1642 and 1649, a staggering one in ten of the adult male population died, more than three times the proportion that died in the World War I and five times the proportion who died in World War II.
The total UK population in 1642 is estimated at five million, of whom roughly two million were men of fighting age. Some 85,000 died on the battlefield, while another 100,000 died of their wounds or of disease. The war was the biggest military mobilisation in English history with a quarter of those eligible to fight finding themselves in uniform.
In a 2004 poll, organised by the BBC, it was revealed that 90 per cent of Britons couldn’t name a single battle of the English Civil War; 80 per cent do not know which English king was executed by Parliament in 1649 (Charles I); and 67 per cent of schoolchildren have never heard of Oliver Cromwell."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/qi/
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