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"Albania" is the eighth episode of the A Series of QI. It was first broadcast on BBC Four on 23 October 2003, and was broadcast on BBC Two a week later. This episode was preceded by "Arthropods" and followed by "Antelopes".

Scores[]

Numbers in brackets mark appearances - e.g. "(2)" means "(second appearance)".

  1. Clive Anderson (2): 37 points
  2. Linda Smith (1): 30 points
  3. Sean Lock (1): 25 points
  4. Alan Davies (8): -30 points

Subjects[]

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  • Elephants can become drunk by eating fruit which ferments in their stomachs.
  • James Bond's Bradford is a cocktail that is shaken, not stirred. A cocktail with two olives in it is called a "Franklin" after Franklin D. Roosevelt. A cocktail with a cocktail onion on a stick is called the "Gibson". The vesper was invented in Casino Royale, because Bond had to give it a new name, because he put vodka in it, making it strictly not a martini. One of Bond's best sayings from Casino Royale was "To Bond, the best drink of the day, was the drink he had in his head before the first drink of the day." The opening line of one of the chapters in the book was "Bond lit his eightieth cigarette of the day."
  • C. B. Fry held the world long jump record in 1913, could jump backwards on to a mantelpiece from a standing position without losing his balance, and after the First World War, was offered the throne of Albania, but turned it down.
  • In Albanian, "Vetullushe" means "A goat with brown eyebrows". That is one of 30 different words for eyebrows in the Albanian language, which didn't impress Linda, because Albanian had one word for "very bushy eyebrow", but English has three. The language also has 27 words for moustaches.
  • The pink fairy is a type of armadillo, whereas the green fairy is absinthe. Armadillos are the only mammals apart from humans that can get leprosy. The male armadillo's penis is two-thirds the length of its body.
  • Benjamin Franklin thought it would be a great idea to find a way to stop flatulence from smelling so bad. Amongst his other inventions were bifocals and the fire brigade.
  • The first processed food produced by H. J. Heinz in 1869 was horseradish.[1][2] Ketchup didn't arrive until 1875 and baked beans didn't arrive until 1895. Supposedly, only 4 people know the secret baked bean recipe. Heinz never had "57 Varieties", they now have over 6,000 varieties. They are obsessed with the number 57 at Heinz, their telephone number ends with 57 57 57 and their address is PO Box 57, Pittsburgh.

General Ignorance[]

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  • Fingernails and hair do not grow after you die. The skin tightens causing an illusion of growth.
  • Bananas come from a herb,[3] which unlike a tree doesn't have a woody stem. The banana fruit is technically a berry.
  • A lili is the offspring of a liger and lion, and a titi is the offspring of a tiglon and a tiger. The statement that they of course have only been bred in captivity because lions are from Africa and tigers are from Asia, so they won't have encountered each other in the wild, is partly incorrect as there are Asiatic lions, although natural crossbreeds are not known to exist.
  • The phrase "Survival of the fittest" was coined by Herbert Spencer,[4] inventor of the paper clip. Darwin adapted it for the "On the Origin of Species". Norwegians believe that the paper clip is a Norwegian invention by Johan Vaaler in 1899. Spencer had patented his design for paper clips almost 30 years before Vaaler in the 1860s, but his supplier went bankrupt and he became ill for 20 years of his life and never followed it up. Today more than 11 billion paperclips are sold annually, but a recent survey claimed that out of every 100,000 sold, only one in five are actually used to hold papers together. The rest are used as poker chips, pipe cleaners, safety pins and toothpicks.

Forfeits[]

  1. Tomato ketchup
  2. Baked beans
  3. Trees
  4. Charles Darwin
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