Anne Miller on her life as QI’S Tartan Elf, one of the team behind the hit TV series and spin-off book
Anne Miller, aka the Tartan Elf, is one of the team behind TV series QI and its spin-off book 1,423 Facts to Bowl You Over. It’s a labour of love and endless research
Avulture can swallow enough botulinum toxin to kill 300,000 guinea pigs. That’s the fact that got me a job with QI and I found it on the wall of Sensation – the interactive science centre in Dundee.
I’ve been a QI Elf for seven years now and one of the best parts of the job (apart from noticing how often you remark “that’s quite interesting” and then realising what you’ve just said) is that finding out interesting facts leads to finding even more interesting facts and you never know when you’re going to come across a cracker. I’ve found facts in online articles – there’s a Starbucks inside the CIA’S headquarters but they don’t write people’s names on the cups – on greetings cards while in the queue at the Post Office – the word ‘stressed’ is ‘desserts’ backwards’ – and in library books that haven’t been opened in so long that they let out a cloud of dust when you turn the page.
QI, the company, is best known as the team behind BBC2’S flagship panel show QI. Less well known is that we are also about to publish our sixth fact book 1,423 QI Facts To Bowl You Over with Faber and Faber, make a weekly podcast No Such Thing As A Fish which has had over 100 million factfilled downloads and is about to embark on a nationwide tour, and that we also make QI’S sister show BBC Radio 4’s The Museum of Curiosity. In Museum, we ask a panel made up of academics, comedians and raconteurs to choose a favourite item to donate to our imaginary museum. Items in the collection so far have included the Big Bang, the urge to press red buttons, a bunch of grapes and a Moomin.
Each series of QI is themed around a letter of the alphabet. Series O starts airing on BBC2 on 20 October and will be overflowing with oodles of facts about ostriches, ornaments and onomatopoeia.
This year I was in charge of the Oceans script which meant seeking out facts about orcas, oil and oysters. One of my favourite questions this series was found by my colleague Edward Brooke-hitching who discovered that publisher Peter Bentley originally turned down Herman Melville’s Moby Dick because he didn’t like the whale. Bentley wrote:
“First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale? While this is a rather delightful, if somewhat esoteric, plot device, we recommend an antagonist with a more popular visage among the younger readers. For instance, could not the Captain be struggling with a depravity towards young, perhaps voluptuous maidens?”
Luckily for Moby Dick, Melville argued the case, the whale stayed and the book was recently named the 17th greatest novel of all time.
Another great joy of working on QI is that each episode has a technical rehearsal where we run through all the questions and pictures to make sure everything is in tip top working order. As the panel aren’t allowed to see the questions before they record, the seats are filled instead by QI Elves and we get to answer questions, set off klaxons and play with the props in a gloriously empty studio that hours later will fill up with 630 guests.
There have been a few changes since Sandi Toksvig took over – one of which is that she likes to test the audience (before the recording starts) with a quick-fire general knowledge quiz in order to crown somebody ‘the smartest person in the room’. We’ve also been trying to sneak in as many Scandinavian references as we can, sometimes known as the ‘Randi Scandi’ facts. My favourite one was when we discovered that the Swedish tourist board had set up a phone number that you could dial and be connected to a random person in Sweden. Sandi rang up from the set and got to chat to someone while they were browsing the supermarket for their dinner.
During the show there are a team of Elves who are on duty and sit at the back of the gallery with their laptops ready in order to keep an eye on proceedings and make sure that the information going out is accurate. Sandi’s notes have been through several stages of verification, so often what sets the alarm bells ringing is when someone says they heard a fact once but can’t quite remember the details so that’s when we jump straight onto Google. Although some people style it out marvellously. In Series N’s
My favourite facts in the new book include: Qatar Airways allows up to six falcons to sit in Economy Class
‘New’ episode Jimmy Carr said “well, you say it’s a myth but I’ve heard it… in a pub. Pretty sure that’s the case.” And, well, you can’t really argue with that.
Each episode of QI records for two hours and that footage is then edited down to produce the half hour episode of QI and the 45 minute extended edition – often shown on television on the following night – which we call QI XL. There is so much information crammed into these recordings that there is a huge amount which will only ever be seen by that night’s studio audience although a good portion do find their way into our fact books. All of the facts in 1,423 QI Facts link together so its assembly is like trying to solve a giant logic puzzle. My favourite facts in it include:
John Bercow MP, Speaker of the House of Commons, has a cat called Order.
Westminster Abbey has a cleric called Canon Ball.
The head of the UK police task force on knife crime is called Alfred Hitchcock.
In French, Jaws became ‘The Teeth of the Sea’.
Honeybees ‘whoop’ when they bump into each other.
Qatar Airways allows up to six falcons to sit in Economy Class.
After shaking hands, most people unwittingly sniff their fingers.
The US Treasury has a ‘Conscience Fund’ for voluntary donations from people feeling guilty about cheating on their taxes.
The Hebridean island of Barra has the only airport in the world that uses a beach as a runway.
In 2017, an Irish beach that had been washed away in 1984 was returned by a freak tide.
The original patent for the
toilet-roll holder showed the paper hanging over the holder, not under.
And we never stop looking for facts. Production is about to start on QI Series P so we are piling up papers for potential P-themed possibilities. Expect plenty on penguins, peppers, paradoxes, pineapples, pearls, pecans, pilots, publishing, pianos, pillows and parachutes.
● Anne Miller is QI’S Tartan Elf. The ‘elves’ are the affectionate name Stephen Fry gave to the team who research and write the QI scripts. Anne is co-author of the new QI book, 1,423 QI Facts to Bowl You Over, published by Faber at £9.99, out now; QI returns to BBC2 on 20 October.