Would I Lie to You?: Difference between revisions

* [[Boring but Practical]]: David Mitchell claimed that the screensaver on his phone was a picture of his "bright beige" living room carpet. He justified it on the grounds that he had a common make and model of phone and he wanted to be able to recognize his own.

* [[Bound and Gagged]]: Ronnie Corbett claimed that he had discovered the 'This Is My' guest in this situation on the golf course next to his home.

{{quote| '''Russell Howard''': This is Chris and Gill; I interviewed them on my radio show because they claimed that they were abducted by aliens.<br />

'''Michael Buerk''': This is Chris and Gill, who are fellow members of the Guildford walking and dining club.<br />

* [[Broken Pedestal]]: When Bernard Cribbins claimed to have sold his wife's car to pay his gambling debts, Lee's team got quite distressed and insisted it just couldn't be true.

{{quote| '''Lee''': We need this to be a lie, Bernard. {{spoiler|''(It was.)''}}}}

{{quote| '''Lee''': Hang on, Michael, Michael. Don't get so technical with me. 'The metal of the car,' yeah? Could you be more specific: what bit of the metal of the car?<br />

'''Michael''': The metal bit.<br />

** David Mitchell when it's revealed that he didn't have a doorknob on his bedroom door for ''two years''.

** Vic Reeves seems to be one in real life. Several of his stories thought to be blatant lies have turned out to be true.

* [[Constantly Curious]]: One method of interrogation. Rob Brydon tried it during his stint as a panelist, although the person he eliminated using this method turned out to be telling the truth.

* [[Comedic Sociopathy]]: Giving a panellist (usually Lee) a ridiculous lie and leaving them to convince the other team of its veracity. On occasions it seems like the other team have actually worked it out a long time ago and are only continuing to question the panellist for the sake of this trope.

** Barry Cryer considers the H14 bus his friend, and says "Hello, darling!" whenever he sees it.

* [[Consummate Liar]]: In Series 3, a "Liar Of The Week" award was introduced for the best liar on each episode.

* [[Conviction By Contradiction]]: The panel will usually vote "Lie" if they can get the opposing panelist to contradict the details in his/her story.

{{quote| ''(Rhys Thomas' claim is that his bed used to belong to John Nettles)''<br />

{{quote| '''Rob Brydon''': Barry Cryer - truth or lie?<br />

'''Barry''': Dramatic pause! Music is heard in the background - it was - [''hits button''] - a lie! }}

{{quote| '''Lee Mack''': What's in your list? ''[Scottish accent]'' ''Six cans of Bitter and a knife!''<br />

'''Frankie Boyle''': Yeah, six cans of Bitter for a ''teetotal alcoholic''!<br />

{{quote| '''Lee:''' To be fair, he does have the haircut of someone who's just ridden a bike.<br />

'''Danny:''' Yes. Backwards. Through a hedge. [[Call Back|On the Moon.]]<ref>Earlier, Sir Chris Hoy claimed he'd been approached by NASA to be the first man to ride a bike on the Moon</ref> }}

* [[Everything Sounds Sexier in French]]: Olivia Colman's {{spoiler|true}} fact was that she pulled a boy by pretending to be French and putting on a fake accent.

* [[Expy]]: Angus Deayton's manner of hosting was very similar to how it was on ''[[Have I Got News for You]]'', including his imaginary "prizes", descriptions of the current points, and "I leave you with news that..."

* [[Face Doodling]]: Lee claimed in a series 5 episode that after an incident with a permanent marker he had to attend his son's parents' evening with a drawn-on moustache and glasses.

* [[For Want of a Nail]]: When Michael Buerk claimed to have stolen an ashtray from 10 Downing Street, Danny Baker joked that Tony Blair's inability to have a smoke was the cause of Britain's involvement in the US-Iraq conflict.

{{quote| '''Danny:''' "Shall we go to war, Cherie, or not? I'll have a cigar and think about it -- No ashtray! We'll go to war!" And that's what you did! That's the consequences! Are - are you proud of what you did?}}

* [[Fridge Logic]]: [[In Universe]] - since the panelists often have to make up stories on the spot, they tend to leave plot holes that are hard to see at the time but become glaringly obvious later (which may play a part in teams working out the truth). One example is David Mitchell's claim that he has a five-point plan for surviving in prison: one point was that he would use his (Cambridge University) degree to his advantage, but he claimed he had come up with the plan when he was 16 or 17, well before he would have started university studies.

* [[Geeky Turn On]]: Lampshaded to hell and back during this bit from the series 4 outtakes show:

* [[GIRL]]: Chris Packham claimed that he and the (male) This Is My guest were married in an online world, where his avatar was based on Audrey Hepburn.

* [[Giving Up On Logic]]: Has happened at least once when David's team have to guess who the This Is My guest is.

* [[Good With Numbers]]: Lee.

* [[Go Through Me]]: When Janet Street-Porter walked threateningly across the stage toward David Mitchell's team having grown annoyed with his manner of questioning, Davina McCall threw an arm out in front of David.

* [[Gretzky Has the Ball]]: David talking about football:

{{quote| '''David''': The goalkeeper's the one that owns the club, right?}}

{{quote| '''David''' (''reacting to Lee's claim that he threw a sausage roll off the top of Blackpool Tower''): Why did you throw it off the top, you're there, there's security there, it's a horrible thing to do! How fast is a hot, or even quite hot, sausage roll going to be moving by the time it hits some morbidly-obese child down on the promenade having a miserable time on holiday in ''Blackpool'' of all places, who's just heard about the divorce of his parents, consoling himself with another load of high-sugar snacks and the next thing he knows, a warm-ish sausage roll hits him ''slap'' in the face?}}

* [[Ham to Ham Combat]]: Charlie Brooker and David Mitchell in the same room? A rant-off was more or less inevitable.

'''Terry''' (''pointing at David's team''): Give them your brutal quipping, not me! I'm on your team!<br />

'''Lee''': Right, Jamelia, you're going to have a bit of brutal quipping! }}

* [[Hurricane of Puns]]: In season 4:

{{quote| ''[Rob has just read out a Ring of Truth that [[Deal or No Deal|Noel Edmonds]] has a pet chef prepare a three-course meal for his cat once a week.]''<br />

* [[I Always Wanted to Say That]]: "Can you ''please'' let me say to Ronnie Corbett, were they four candles or handles for forks?"

** In Series 4, Lee gets to deliver the ancient joke about what happens when you fail to pay the person you hire to exorcise your home (it gets repossessed) and looks ''extremely'' pleased with himself.

* [[I Am Spartacus]]: "''I'm'' posh and a little bit gay!"

* [[I Know You Know I Know]]: The general attitude seems to be that stories should be judged on their merits, which implies that the person whose turn it is really will be trying to convince the other team that their "fact" is true; however, half the time the story really is true, and since the objective is to fool the other team, presumably the person will be trying to tell it in a way that [[Reality Is Unrealistic|makes it sound unlikely and badly thought out]]; on the other hand, it might really just be unlikely and badly thought out... and so on. Trisha Goddard [[The Ditz|of all people]] nearly managed to get a ridiculous-sounding true This Is My past Lee's team by giggling her way through it and making no effort to make it sound plausible; they apparently considered her [[Beneath Suspicion]].

'''Lee''': So just to absolutely establish -- you're taking out the biscuit, you're discarding it because it's crumbled, if it's not crumbled you tend to throw it away but not always; then you'll slide them out like some sort of magician, on your hand like that, you'll get the jar, you'll insert them in unless it's a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz-Keks Leibniz]... whatever the bloody hell they are... they go in, it comes off, there's one left, it's not damaged; give it to the dog that [[Beyond the Impossible|used to be brown but is now black]] -- is what you're telling us is what's happening in your house. You're mental. 'Course it's true. }}

* [[Let Us Never Speak of This Again]]: What David Mitchell speculated was the likely response to Neil Morrissey (the voice of children's TV character [[Bob the Builder]]) learning that one of the builders who was working on an extension on his house was also called Bob: "A quick chuckle [followed by]... let us never speak of this."

* [[Loads and Loads of Characters]]: The show doesn't have any topical theme and the panelists explaining/making up their stories provides the comedy, so is more welcoming to guests from other fields unlike shows such as ''[[Mock the Week]]'' or ''[[QI]]''. Repeat guests are hence more of a rarity.

* [[A Man Is Not a Virgin]]: Poor Jimmy Carr...

* [[Medium Awareness]]: Several jokes about the host's use of an autocue, such as the joke Angus Deayton read out after David Mitchell's claim that he used to proofread dictionaries for a living:

{{quote| '''Angus:''' Proofreading, of course, is vital to any piece of writing. Even the scripts on this show are subject to rigorous scrutinae.}}

** Similarly, [[Richard E Grant]] cracked a few jokes of this nature when the subject of his (possible) Shakespearean-themed techno single came up.

{{quote| '''Lee Mack''': How did Ken convince you it was a good idea?<br />

{{quote| '''David:''' Why would a new Year's Eve show need a unicorn statue?<br />

'''Julian:''' Well, it ''was'' the nineties. }}

* [[Not Making This Up Disclaimer]]: If the other team are clearly not believing a panellist's lie, the liar may throw this in as a desperate attempt.

* [[Now You Tell Me]]: If a story has descended into chaos and/or gotten David particularly riled, Lee will sometimes chime in with a humorously belated "No, wait, he/I read that wrong, it's actually [completely different statement]."

* [[Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping]]: Mark Watson's fake Welsh accent noticeably faltered when he was claiming that he wrote a will after losing a game of Connect 4 when he was six. {{spoiler|The story was true, though}}.

* [[Oop North]]: Lee, as noted above. His justification for throwing a sausage roll off Blackpool Tower was that he was Northern ("as if a Northerner would throw away anything wrapped in pastry!"), and Rob Brydon reasoned his claim that he moved to Southport (see the example in Pull The Thread, below) had to be untrue because he's "never been out of the North".

{{quote| '''Frankie''': I'm honestly struggling with the idea that you went for a day out to Alton Towers. Were you presenting a documentary for [[BBC 4]] about the horrors of modern life?}}

* [[Out of Focus]]: Several guests never get to make any claims that actually get aired. This has happened more often in later series, as the edit now seems to be more concerned with the funniest material rather than the amount of airtime between panellists being balanced.

** When asked by Greg Davies in a series 5 episode, David stated he did feel a sense of competition about the show.

* [[Potty Emergency]]: In Series 5, Sarah Millican claimed that, when stuck in a traffic jam for two and a half hours with a full bladder, she relieved herself on the passenger seat (after first moving over from the driver's seat). {{spoiler|It was true.}}

{{quote| ''[In the Ring of Truth round, David has been told that Bono's trilby which he paid $1,200 to have flown first class was "upgraded" from first class to the cockpit and is insisting that this is not an upgrade]''<br />

'''David''': You see, never buy a first class ticket, you might end up getting "upgraded" and have to fly the fucking plane! }}

'''Jack''': You can't say "why is this happening, bear?"?<br />

'''David''': No! Otherwise the bear's just gonna go "and then "why is this happening, bear?" said Frankie Boyle for some reason". The little bears say "I don't like this part of the story". "Yeah, I'll stop reading it shall I? "No no no!" screamed Frankie Boyle, "don't stop reading this story, or it is the end of my life!" "No, this is definitely not suitable for little bears." ''[mimes closing a book]'' }}

** Lee has raged several times against the writers when he got particularly difficult lies to tell.

* [[Reality Is Unrealistic]]: Lampshaded by David Mitchell in a Series 2 outtake where Lee refuses to believe one of the true facts. "You've got to understand, the very truths they pick are the unlikely ones!"

{{quote| '''David:''' He dropped the bag. ''(pause)'' Thud.}}

* [[Schmuck Bait]]: David Mitchell's "fact" in the final episode of Series 2 was that as a child, he dressed himself as an 18th-century nobleman. Within minutes, Lee's team was sold on it being absolutely true, but Lee wondered if it was "too obvious" as something David would do...before deciding to say it was true. {{spoiler|Subverted, when it did turn out to be true.}}

{{quote| '''Angus Deayton''': And now, for the round you've all been waiting for...the last one.}}

** Robert Webb claimed he had been voted the 88th Sexiest Man in the World by the readers of ''Blind and Wretched'' magazine.

'''Lee:''' Oh, all right, then. }}

* [[Shout Out]]: In his appearance, Rhys Thomas spends the episode dressed as [[Doctor Who (TV)|the Fifth Doctor]]. Absolutely no one notices or calls attention to it.

** The panelists have grown quite [[Genre Savvy]] about it as well:

{{quote| ''[Fern Britton has claimed that the special guest is her morris dancing partner]''<br />

'''Rob Brydon''': Our next round is called the ring of truth. I'll be offering the teams some bizarre celebrity facts, but are they true? Or are they from [[Wikipedia]]. }}

** David has some, too:

* [[Tears of Fear]]: Lee claimed to have provoked these in a hitchhiker he once picked up, as he had to stop the car and [[The All Solving Hammer|hit the engine with a hammer to get it going again]] and told the hitchhiker "Don't worry, I'm not going to kill you" as he got the hammer. David Mitchell found the whole idea ridiculous.

{{quote| '''David:''' He ''cried''? That's a very odd response to immediate mortal danger! To just slightly well up! I would have thought that was more 'the end of ''It's a Wonderful Life''' reaction! "Oh dear, I am to die, it appears!" Rather than "AAAARRRGHHH! GET OUT OF THE CAR!! RUN!!" No, but just a slight welling up... "Ah well, all things come to an end!"}}

'''David''': All right. }}

* [[Whammy]]: A team can be leading for much of the show, only to be given some ridiculous lies in the Quick Fire Lies round. Lee's team was 5-2 ahead in the penultimate episode of Series 3... and then Lee had to claim that he couldn't eat custard creams as they reminded him of the bullies at his old school. The round continued in much the same way and they lost their lead, the game ending in a 5-all draw.

{{quote| '''Lee''': And yet there's a massive voice in my head saying this is true.<br />

'''Michael Ball''': I know exactly what you're saying.<br />

'''Michael Ball''': Yeah. It's a lie. Let's not look stupid. }}

** In series 5, Rhod Gilbert's claim that he paid for £15 worth of tapas with a Nissan Micra turned out to be true. David Mitchell's response was to straight-up call him a moron.

** Ronnie Corbett claimed to have found the This Is My guest bound and gagged in a sand pit on a golf course after some kind of wild night out.

** In Series 6, Richard Madeley claimed to have woken up on Christmas morning nude in a cupboard under the stairs in his house holding two empty cans of fake snow after having been very drunk the previous night. {{spoiler|It was true.}}

'''Konnie Huq''': I don't know if this is in the spirit of this game, but it really is true.<br />

'''Lee''': I'd like to say I'm not stupid enough to fall for this again...<ref> And he still ends up guessing that Konnie's story is the true one, and is wrong again.</ref> }}

* [[Women Drivers]]: Michael McIntyre blamed the fact that his car could only turn left for a fortnight on his wife having an accident whilst driving it.

* [[Working Class People Are Morons]]: Averted in that David and Lee are more or less tied in terms of points and wins. Played straight in the endless stream of "dumb Northerner" jokes directed at Lee.