British Comedy Guide
QI. Image shows from L to R: Alan Davies, Sandi Toksvig. Copyright: TalkbackThames
QI

QI

  • TV panel show
  • BBC Two / BBC One / BBC Four
  • 2003 - 2025
  • 324 episodes (22 series)

Panel game that contains lots of difficult questions and a large amount of quite interesting facts. Stars Sandi Toksvig, Stephen Fry and Alan Davies.

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Press clippings Page 26

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.

David Butcher, Radio Times, 8th November 2013

QI: how much money does Broadway make?

From the brains behind the BBC quiz show. This week: QI's on Broadway.

Molly Oldfield and John Mitchinson, The Telegraph, 6th November 2013

Poor, hapless Alan Davies is on the receiving end of a storm of QI klaxons as he good-naturedly lurches from one wrong answer to the next. But it's an honourable tradition and Davies is a willing fallguy - he even fails at a supposedly foolproof experiment involving a broom's centre of gravity.

Elsewhere, guests Danny Baker, Jo Brand and Marcus Brigstocke enjoy a bit of a jolly knockabout that's full of surprises and "well, I never knew that" sort of facts, including the answer to questions such as £what do mosquitos do in the rain?" and which country has the longest traffic jams. At one point it all becomes a bit much for Baker who wails, "On behalf of the audience I have to say, sometimes I hate this programme."

Alison Graham, Radio Times, 1st November 2013

QI: the king with a love of 'wicked sex'

From the brains behind the BBC quiz show. This week: QI is scandalicious.

Molly Oldfield and John Mitchinson, The Telegraph, 30th October 2013

How we craft Quite Interesting facts

James "Turbo" Harkin - QI's head elf - let's us in on the mysterious art of fact crafting...

James Harkin, Waterstones, 24th October 2013

QI: Prince George's christening special

From the brains behind the BBC quiz show. This week, to mark Prince George's christening: QI gorges on Georges.

The Telegraph, 23rd October 2013

So long has QI been going (a decade; we're now up to "K" in the alphabet) that some of the arcane facts presented in earlier seasons of the show (there's no way of knowing how old a lobster is) have since been disproved. That uncertainty forms the agreeable theme of tonight's show ("knowledge"). Here, the guests (Graham Linehan and Jo Brand) not only arrive circuitously at their answers, they also question their legitimacy. Incidentally, should you ever need to age a lobster, you cut off its eye stalks and count the rings.

John Robinson, The Guardian, 18th October 2013

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.

David Butcher, Radio Times, 18th October 2013

QI: what do you get if you cross a whale and a dolphin?

A quietly intriguing column from the brains behind QI, the BBC quiz show. This week: QI on dolphins.

Molly Oldfield and John Mitchinson, The Telegraph, 16th October 2013

QI: Some quite interesting facts about Danes

A quietly intriguing column from the brains behind QI, the BBC quiz show. This week: QI has a Danish.

Molly Oldfield & John Mitchinson, The Telegraph, 9th October 2013

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