QI

Why Shorty Longbottom is really 'QI'

General knowledge. It's up there with nature study tables and The Goon Show on the radio, the Assyrian coming down like a wolf on the fold, biking to school and the sum of the hypotenuse.

QI: quite interesting facts about skiing

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

Mistimed for Halloween, but well-timed as the thirteenth episode, QI continued its "G" series with a look at "Gothic". This was probably one of my favourite episodes in quite some time, not least because I'm saturnine enough to appreciate ghoulish trivia about gargoyles (they're actually water-spouts, the purely decorative ones are called "grotesques"), zombies (it would take about a month for one zombie to infect the entire world), novelty coffins (a modern tradition in Ghana, apparently), etc. Plus, great comedy does tend to bubble up from the darker corners of the human experience. To that end, misanthrope Jack Dee and the cynicism of Jimmy Carr were employed well, and Sue Perkins proved (where Sandy Toksvig and Jo Brand have failed to this year) that, yes, women on panel shows can be funny! Spooky.

QI: Quite Interesting facts about lost languages

A quietly intriguing column from the brains behind QI, the BBC quiz show. This week: QI looks at lost languages.

Ah, QI. It's the televisual equivalent of punting down the Thames in a top hat and tails, isn't it? It's an afternoon spent leisurely playing croquet with Mater and Pater, drinking cups of Earl Grey and reading PG Wodehouse. It's everything this proud nation stands for isn't it? Well, yes it is. This is the nation of intellectual snobbery, extreme pedantry and Gyles Brandreth after all.

Stephen Fry is a funny, charming man. All you must do to retain that image of him is remember he's a (quite) good author, he was in A Bit of Fry & Laurie, Blackadder and the less twee of his recent documentaries (obviously block out Kingdom, his crashingly dull Twitterisms and his shameless, omnipresent advert ho-ing).

The format, a simple panel game, works well enough and, along with some often genuinely interesting topics, it gives enough opportunities for some for the better guests to put their amusing spin on it and make for agreeable, if slightly passive, watching.

So why do we hate it? [Deep breath] Well... It's Jonathan Creek and his 'Cutesy Little Brother' act or whatever it is he's trying to do by consistently failing to grasp the basic idea of the show for 'comedic' effect, much to the hilarity of the fawning, hyperactive studio audience. It's a Quite Interesting fact that 98% of Davies's laughs are achieved by acting out a simplified version of another panelist's joke again and again and again, all the while looking like Anita Roddick in a particularly loud and ill-fitting blouse. Sitting there grinning, acting like a black hole swallowing up all the jokes and trivia, a comedy anti-catalyst extraordinaire, the anti-Midas of the one-liner. He is consistently, no always the least funny, the most annoying participant and yet, he's always there. He's the one constant. He's ALWAYS there. He's enough to make you wish your left eye was blind.

tvBite wouldn't point any of this out to him of course. We value our ears far too much to do that.

Some episodes of QI are quite funny, others are quite interesting. The best episodes combine the two to become extremely entertaining, but I think "Gravity" will have to settle for quite interesting. Actually, make that very interesting. This was one of those episodes where the sheer wealth of astonishing trivia overshadowed the jokes because the guests were hanging on Stephen Fry's every word. Ordinarily, I'd grumble about them being paid to sit there as glorified members of the studio audience, but I actually don't blame them because I was similarly fascinated...

Regardless, it was a shame Rich Hall didn't make much of an impression here, as he's ordinarily good value as the laconic interjector, but my low expectations for QI newbie Barry Humphries were proven well founded. He's only ever funny in the guise of his alter-ego Dame Edna Everage (and even the hilarity of Edna's debatable), and his lacklustre performance here proved so. Humphries' garish clothes were the only thing memorable about him. So yes, we'll have to put this episode down as a something you'll find yourself enjoying mainly for non-comedic reasons. I'm still fascinated by the fact it takes 42-minutes to fall through the Earth's surface to any point on the planet (be it London to Australia, or London to Paris), and that the bullet from a gun fired while aimed parallel to the ground at arm's length will hit the ground at the same time you simply drop a bullet held at the same height.

The frustrating thing about QI is that it's increasingly difficult to impress people down the pub with the littleknown facts it throws up, as it's become so popular (and it repeated so often) that your source is always never in doubt.

QI: Quite interesting facts about St Valentine's Day

A quietly intriguing column from the brains behind QI, the BBC quiz show. This week: QI celebrates St Valentine.

This esoteric quiz continues to leave us feeling we've learned something new. Tonight Stephen Fry and Alan Davies welcome guest panellist Barry Humphries. Let us hope that Humphries will display the same acerbic wit as his alter ego, Dame Edna.

QI: Quite interesting facts about musical instruments

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