How the QI elves took over the airwaves
No one can unearth a bizarre factoid like a QI researcher can. With a new compendium out, the ‘elves’ talk to Tristram Fane Saunders
Quite interesting: a modest boast. Not “extremely”, or even “very”, but a quintessentially British “quite”. That’s the motto of BBC Two’s panel show QI, a feast of obscure factoids now in its 15th series.
Since 2003, it’s provided fuel for countless pub discussions: did you know that the Dalai Lama is afraid of caterpillars? That cows moo in regional accents? That diamonds can be made from peanut butter?
Behind the scenes, the show’s researchers – known as “QI elves” – scour newspapers, museums and dark corners of the internet for trivia. But in the early years they had a problem: there were simply too many facts.
“It was really frustrating,” says Anna Ptaszynski, a long-serving elf. “Just 1 per cent makes it into the show. We were constantly having these chats about amazing things we’d discovered but they weren’t going anywhere. So, we thought, let’s just sit around a microphone and chat about it.”
These chats became weekly podcast No Such Thing as a Fish, in which four elves share their favourite discoveries. They each have their own specialism. Dan Schreiber, QI’S cheeky librarian, is obsessed with the hunt for Bigfoot; while James Harkin, an ex-accountant, has a head for numbers; on the back of an envelope, he worked out that the dish of the world’s largest telescope could hold enough cornflakes to give Earth’s population a bowl for breakfast every day for a year; Andrew Huntermurray, a deadpan comedian who writes for Private Eye, specialises in odd history. (“And parachuting animals”, he tells me. “Such as the parachuting dogs in the Normandy landings. They were British Army German shepherds. A bit ironic.”) Meanwhile, Ptaszynski, mock-serious and keeping the others in line, loves anthropology and 19th-century news.
It’s fair to say the podcast has been “quite” successful. Its episodes have been listened to more than 100 million times, with 1.5 million new streams every month – although, as Harkin modestly points out, “It might just be one person listening 1.5 million times.”
Hunter-murray remembers the “eureka” moment in 2014 that started it all. “Dan and James were talking, and one of them said that there are 600 men in the world with two penises – which is true! It’s ridiculously interesting. We realised we had to start a podcast just to get this information out. And that, I’m afraid, is the smutty cornerstone on which the whole of No
Such Thing as a Fish has been built.” In 2016, it made the leap to TV, and today the team publish The Book of the
Year, a compendium of topical facts in 365 categories. It’s laced with their dry wit, and likely to end up in many a pub-quizzer’s Christmas stocking. Ahead of its release, the elves told The
Daily Telegraph 10 of their top facts.