This is exactly the sort of plausible just-so story I would expect from QI.
On another episode, Stephen Fry explains with no doubt equal earnestness that the fins on a Saturn V rocket are there to generate lift as it travels through the atmosphere.
It's fun, as any panel show helmed by Fry certainly would be. But you don't want to put too much faith in what you hear on it, at least in advance of checking with a credible source.
They have a pretty solid research team (https://qi.com/elves), and they often do segments about times they've gotten things wrong, or the science has changed etc.
It is first and foremost an entertainment program, so yeah.
I think this is a case of a word having one colloquial meaning and a different technical meaning. If you "lift" something, you're probably picking it up.
In a hydrodynamic sense, "lift" is a force on a foil moving through a fluid. This kind of lift is a force orthogonal to the direction of motion through the fluid and the surface of the foil. That could be upward lift, like that on the wings of an aircraft. That could also be the forward and leeward lift on the sail of a sailboat, or the windward lift on the sailboat's keel. It could also be the lateral, stabilizing lift on the control surfaces of a rocket.
Maybe hydrodynamic lift is what was meant, but if so, it wasn't well described; it sticks out in memory precisely because he made it sound like the fins contributed on net to reaching orbital energy and I might've yelled at the screen a little bit about that.
On another episode, Stephen Fry explains with no doubt equal earnestness that the fins on a Saturn V rocket are there to generate lift as it travels through the atmosphere.
It's fun, as any panel show helmed by Fry certainly would be. But you don't want to put too much faith in what you hear on it, at least in advance of checking with a credible source.