Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry to voice new natural history documentary

Stephen Fry will be the voice behind BBC One's Hidden Kingdoms, which highlights the dangers faced by chipmunks, dung beetles and the tree shrew.

For an episode entitled Keeps, Stephen Fry introduces a one-off round called "Keep Still or Scarper", turning on whether it's safer to run away or freeze when confronted with certain wild animals. His demonstration of how to proceed if you bump into a pack of wolves (roaring like an angry Victorian gentleman, basically) makes you long to see the confrontation for real.

Elsewhere, there are insights into whether ants can hold their drink, the smile of a bowhead whale and a dispute between Fry and Bill Bailey about Welsh accents. Also adding to the fun - Sarah Millican and Jason Manford.

In a series famous for facts, here's a killer one: of the things QI presented as true in its first series, 60 per cent are now thought untrue. Stephen Fry announces this near the start of a landmark (and very funny) edition where he explains "the half-life of facts" - scientists revising knowledge about how many moons the Earth has, for instance - and makes recompense for all the points that should have been awarded over the years for answers that have proved to be right, as a result of which Alan Davies is retrospectively awarded... 737 points.

Davies is on good comedy form, pretending to pluck the legs off a millipede or describing his stealthy mother-in-law. We also learn how the Romans avoided forgetting names and how 19th-century Germans realised birds fly south for the winter - a flabbergasting story.

Stephen Fry injured after falling out of bed

The QI host posted news of his mishap on Twitter saying he had been left with "noble scars on forehead & bridge of nose".

Stephen Fry films 'Wild Weekends' with Bear Grylls

Stephen Fry has filmed a one-off survival programme with Bear Grylls.

Look out for a revealing exchange tonight between Stephen Fry and Alan Davies, comedy's most unlikely double act. They're friends off-screen, and there's a lovely spat where Fry grumbles under his breath that Davies didn't invite him to his wedding. "I DID invite you but you didn't come!" Davies protests, and Fry has to bury his head in his hands in shame as Davies reminds him that it was filming an episode of Bones that kept him away.

Aside from these recriminations, it's the usual pattern of recent QI episodes: Fry answering his own questions at length while the panellists chuckle along. Along the way, there's a detour into bestiality, some amusing Korean sayings and the timeless line: "Are you ready for me to pump the custard?"

Stephen Fry verbally attacks 'creep' journalist

Author and polymath takes grave exception to a diary piece about the timing of his tweets, attacking the journalist as a "creep from the inner ring of Satan's rectum".

It's a round titled "Kit and Kaboodle" and Stephen Fry wants to know if there's a use for kitty-litter that doesn't involve cats. Alan Davies tries to be helpful, but his contribution ("In an episode of Jonathan Creek I weed into some cat litter") isn't quite what Fry is after. Ross Noble and Noel Fielding, with Australian comic Colin Lane, can't quite lift the episode off the ground.

But there are some bright bits, including Fry demonstrating martial arts on a pile of three bricks: "This takes extreme focus and extreme pain," says Fry, wincing in agony.

Bad Education has got Jack Whitehall in it and Jack Whitehall is sick. (As I believe young people are wont to describe things of which they violently approve.) Whitehall (born 1988, the bastard!) is someone you might certainly wish to hate if he weren't so utterly charming, enormously talented and disarmingly honest. He went to Marlborough (he's the son of an actress and a leading theatrical agent) and one of the things that's great about him is that he makes absolutely no pretence that he's anything other than a smug, louche, overprivileged, desperately middle-class public school tosser with a weapons-grade sense of entitlement.

Whitehall has built his career on playing thinly-disguised versions of himself, whether as the eyelash-batting school tart flirting outrageously with susceptible prefect Stephen Fry on QI, or as swaggering Old Stoic JP in Fresh Meat or, in Bad Education, the spectacularly useless, impeccably middle-class, Mumford & Sons-loving Mr Wickers.

There is lots wrong with Bad Education, starting with the fact that it has nothing whatsoever satirically insightful to say about the failings of sink comprehensives like the one in which it is set. And how come the class sizes are smaller than you get in many private schools? And how come the kids, even the supposedly delinquent ones, all have hearts of gold? In truth, Bad Education would work just as well on a spaceship, or in a jungle village, or in the lodging house shared by three priests on a remote Irish island...

Just like Father Ted, though (which of course gave us little insight into the Catholic Church), Bad Education transcends its obvious limitations by simple virtue of being naturally funny. From the way it's shot to the way it's acted, it oozes the cocky, infectious confidence of a winner.

It doesn't matter that the jokes are hit and miss. When they work, you love them, like the one where the white headmaster, who has already upset a black parent with the insensitive use of a racial term ('Perhaps, with hindsight best left to rappers. Eh, bro?'), decides to open the school swimming gala as if it were an Olympic ceremony. He does so in a white bathrobe, lighting a candelabra of torches which unfortunately collapses to become a flaming cross, even as the pointed hood on his robe sticks up and he dances in embarrassment as the black parent looks on in horror. Totally contrived; utterly ludicrous; but a gag that will stick in the memory like the rude vegetables scene from Blackadder II.

Knee-jerk reactions, klaxons and Kiesselbach's plexus are among the subjects under scurrilous discussion as QI returns for its 11th series - which means we've reached the letter K in our comedy intellectual hike through the alphabet. Fount of all knowledge Stephen Fry is back on his throne, the kittenish Alan Davies by his side, joined tonight by perennial quiz show panellist David Mitchell, versatile Jack Whitehall - showing his brainy side after laddy larks with One Direction on A League Of Their Own - and comedian Sara Pascoe. Kick back and find out how Father Christmas, the colour orange and pandas manage to pad their way into the show.