"Descendants" is the eighth episode of the D Series of QI and the 44th episode overall. It is a Children in Need special. It was first broadcast on BBC Four on 10 November 2006, and was broadcast on BBC Two on 17 November 2006.
The episode featured the highest score by a panellist at the time: Jonathan Ross with 3,000,000 points, after Fry announced that he would multiply each score by a million as it was a special episode. This record was later superseded by Fry in "Jumble". Pudsey appeared briefly in this episode in Alan's seat, and toy bears of Pudsey were given to each panellist (along with a huge Pudsey behind Fry). The episode was preceded by "Differences" and followed by "Doves".
Scores[]
Numbers in brackets mark appearances - e.g. "(2)" means "(second appearance)".
- Jonathan Ross (1): 3,000,000 points
- Rich Hall (13): 2,000,000 points
- Phill Jupitus (10): 1,000,000 points
- Alan Davies (44): -29,000,000 points
Pudsey sat in Davies' chair and pressed his buzzer, but went to sit in the audience after that.
Subjects[]
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- While adults have kneecaps, babies don't because the ones they have are made of cartilage. Cartilage accounts for all the bones found in babies, around 300 soft bones, due to the fact that their bodies have yet to form the bone material needed to make the major areas like the skull, but because of this they have 94 more bones in their body than is found in an adult. As a baby grows, the cartilage eventually fuses together to form the 206 bones that an average human body has. Feet have around 52 bones in them, which account for a quarter of the bones that are found in the body.
- The paradoxical frog, found in South America, has not only a grunt that sounds like a pig, but it is the only species in the world that has offspring three times its own size; the offspring eventually reduce to the size that the adult is.
- If she was eligible, Barbie could have been a US President.[1] Barbie's maiden name is "Roberts"; her inventor gave her the name "Barbara Millicent Roberts". Barbie is a trained scientist, has larger breasts than you might imagine, has over a billion pairs of shoes and is only 11 inches tall. If she existed for real at a height of 5'6", she would be unable to stand because her shoe size would be three, and her breasts would be 39 inches, which would cause her to fall flat onto her face. She also could not menstruate because she would lack around 17-22% of the body fat needed to do so. Until 2000, she lacked a navel, and her first words were made in 1992 and included amongst them "Maths is tough" and "Will we ever have enough clothes".
- The following fictional superheroes - Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, and Superman - all helped to fight real-life crime, because they were inspirations to people who wanted to combat it:
- In 1979, a Spider-Man comic featured a story in which one of his arch-enemies, Kingpin, used a tagging device so he could trace the superhero's movements. A judge from New Mexico, Judge Jack Love, was so inspired by it, he reasoned that a real device should be made, so a few years after the story was published, he helped to invent the electronic tag for monitoring convicted criminals.
- Wonder Woman's creator, William Moulton Marston, was quite interested in people's responses when under stress. As a psychology professor, he found that when people were under pressure, their blood pressure would increase as a result, and so he used his findings to help invent the lie detector. When he wrote stories for Wonder Woman, he did so under the pen name of "Charles Moulton", and he lived his life in a polyamorous relationship, living with both his wife and a woman he had an affair with, each of whom had two children with him.
- During the 1940s, Stetson Kennedy considered the Ku Klux Klan to be the most loathsome organisation in the United States, so he infiltrated them and learned all of their secrets. Around that time, there was a radio show for Superman which was quite popular, so Stetson wrote to the show's producers and asked them to do an episode, in which the plot had Superman fighting against the KKK, providing them with what he knew about the organisation's secrets. Within two weeks of the episode being broadcast, the KKK recruitment rate dropped right down to zero.
- Roald Dahl is credited for being the co-inventor of the Wade-Dahl-Till valve, which is used to treat Hydrocephalus - also known as "Water on the Brain". Before it was invented, the cure for the condition at the time used a different valve that was clunkily-designed and often got jammed and stuck. When Dahl's son Theo was struck by a car in an accident in New York, Dahl considered this valve to be not good enough, so met with others to devise a new one, leading to the creation of the Wade-Dahl-Till valve. It is believed that 3,000 children have been saved by this valve and had their lives massively improved as a result.
- The original Oompa-Loompas that Roald Dahl created were black[2] and came from Africa. The ones that are seen in the movies are orange because Dahl's publishers, Knopf, felt it was wrong to have black pygmies slaving away in a factory; they felt it was slightly kind of unfortunate.
- In the British children's show Clangers, an episode called "Chicken" features a scene in which a voice actor says (through a swanee whistle) - "Oh sod it, the bloody thing's stuck again". The show was created by Oliver Postgate, who created other children shows including Bagpuss and Noggin the Nog. It took both him and Peter Firmin a month to make a single episode of Clangers, and all the episodes were created in a barn. The highest ratings that the Clangers got was 10 million viewers, when they appeared in an episode of Doctor Who in 1972, called "The Sea Devils".
- The language spoken by Bill and Ben on the British children's show, Flower Pot Men, is "Oddle Poddle".[3] A newspaper article wrote a story, some twenty years ago, claiming that the language was called "Flobbadob", and originated from the sound made by the younger brothers of Hilda Brabban, of them farting whilst in a bath. However, the voice actor, Peter Hawkins, quickly wrote a rebuttal to this, and his son, Silas, sent a letter to QI stating the same thing after the show put forward this fact in Series B - that it was untrue. In "Oddle Poddle", the word "Flobbadob" means flowerpot.
General Ignorance[]
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- The most listened to tune in the world is the Gran Vals by the Spanish composer, Francisco Tárrega.[4] The tune is well known to people as the "Nokia tune". Nokia produces around 6.5 million phones every second.
- The best things to know about ferns are that they are poisonous, carcinogenic, that they pollinate by flinging their seeds, and that they are the second oldest plant, after moss; ferns are three times older than dinosaurs.
- Terry Wogan is descended from the Welsh.[5] All Wogans in Ireland are said to be descended from Wales. Terry Wogan currently holds the World Record for setting the longest record putt on TV, which is 33 yards, and was done at the golf course at Gleneagles; it is considered to be longer than any professional golfer has ever done.
- All of the money that is donated to Children in Need, never goes towards any administration costs. The first Children in Need that was held in 1980, raised £1,000,000.