QI

QI Book of the Dead - exclusive extracts

QI author John Mitchinson introduces exclusive extracts from a new book from the brains behind the TV show - 'dead good' according to Stephen Fry.

How long is a piece of string?

Alan Davies leaves behind his role in the TV quiz show QI to explore the world of quantum mechanics for the BBC science programme Horizon.

QI to face-off against The Bill

BBC1 is to pitch panel show QI against ITV1 police drama The Bill when the Stephen Fry-fronted show returns for its seventh series next month.

John Lloyd, producer of Not the Nine O'Clock News, Blackadder and currently QI, takes The Word magazine's invitation to list Five Lessons I've Learnt as an opportunity for a curmudgeonly polemic. Today's programme makers, he argues, pick ideas apart instead of using intuition, and say: "If people want crap, let's give them crap." "When we [Lloyd's generation] made programmes, the idea was to make them as unlike anything else that was around at the time. Now it's got to be exactly the same as something that's already successful." All very cogent, although some wonder how Lloyd evinced his lifelong quest for original shows by following the brainy TV panel game QI with the brainy radio panel game The Museum of Curiosity.

Davies fears for QI's future

Alan Davies fears will be axed because the BBC have been slow in commissioning a seventh series.

You need to watch QI. I don't know if you know it at all, it's been around for a while in England. Stephen Fry's the host, Alan Davies is the permanent guest star and there's a rotating panel of famous people whose qualification for being on is they're amusing. Or Quite Interesting, which is what QI stands for. It's really just people talking shit. Tonight they're Rob Brydon, Andy Hamilton and Charlie Higson. I only really know Rob Brydon, and I love him. He's in Gavin & Stacey at the moment, it was on UKTV last night, he plays Bryn, Stacey's uncle. The topics on QI are letters from the alphabet, we're up to the Fs at this point, a fair way into the series. But it's a loose half hour. Tonight includes James Bond's job, Mick Jagger's walk, Bert Ward's post-Batman and Robin career in porn, and flags. Quite a lot about flags - extremely entertaining and mindless, just what you need during stressful times of (insert source of personal worry here). Even the buzzers are good - Andy Hamilton's is the Captain Pugwash music.

Alan Davies quivering over QI

Alan Davies fears QI will be axed.

Quaintly instructive: the QI literary quiz

Just what were the 39 steps? Whose bonkbuster allegedly made the earth move? And which celebrity author had a job that paid a pitcher of wine a day? Perk up your grey matter with an exclusive QI literary quiz.

Nerd on your gift list? Give a Gömböc!

We buy pet rocks, snuggies, and shrinky-dinks; mathematicians have Klein bottles, Mobius strips, and the ultimate mathematical novelty item, the Gömböc. Gömb means "sphere" in Hungarian, but the Gömböc is an extraordinary shape all its own (and is apparently pronounced "goemboets"). As QI host Stephen Fry demonstrates in the video above, no matter how you set it down, the Gömböc will wobble and rock itself right side up. And, unlike the common Weeble, the amazing Gömböc isn't weighted. It rights itself thanks to its unusual geometry.

A Blissful, Timeless Exploration Of Human 'Ignorance'

The 18th century poet Thomas Gray is responsible for the often quoted phrase, "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." President Thomas Jefferson embellished that quotation with one of his own when he said, "If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy?" - a line that British comedy writers John Lloyd and John Mitchinson co-opted for the title of their new anthology of quotations.

Lloyd and Mitchinson talk with Liane Hansen about their third book together, titled If Ignorance Is Bliss ... Why Aren't There More Happy People?. It follows The Book of General Ignorance and The Book of Animal Ignorance.