Four QI researchers known as the Elves fronted this studio spin-off of their hit podcast, No Such Thing as a Fish. Each week James Harkin, Anna Ptaszynski, Dan Schreiber and Andrew Hunter Murray selected one favourite fact provoked by the headlines, then riffed on the tangential stories they had unearthed. Recorded before a live audience at Greenwich’s Up the Creek Comedy Club and clocking in at thirty minutes, the show mixed pub-quip camaraderie with the nerdy joy of a late-night Wikipedia hole. Viewers’ oddities arrived in the “Special Correspondence” slot, while Jane Hill and Matthew Amroliwala gamely played straight men in filmed skits that sent up the BBC’s own news delivery.
Producer John Lloyd commissioned the series after BBC News director James Harding heard the Elves’ podcast, itself named after Stephen Jay Gould’s conclusion that “there is no such thing as a fish” because aquatic vertebrates share no single common ancestor. That spirit of taxonomic mischief carried into the TV version, where a salmon’s closer relation to a camel than to a hagfish might segue into reports of Senegal’s wrestling hyenas or the British embassy’s 19th-century cat budget. The format stayed loose: no desk, no autocue, just four friends swapping footnotes faster than the autocue could scroll.
BBC Two aired two series between May and November 2016, totalling thirteen episodes. A pilot was released as Episode 114 of the podcast; the Elves revived the brand on Facebook Live from February 2017, proving the appetite for their weekly fact dump outlived the broadcast run.
Production Details
BBC Two / 2 Seasons / 13 Episodes / 2016
Writer(s): Anna Ptaszynski, James Harkin, Dan Schreiber
Producer(s): John Lloyd
Main Cast
James Harkin as Presenter
Anna Ptaszynski as Presenter
Dan Schreiber as Presenter
Andrew Hunter Murray as Presenter
Matthew Amroliwala as Thanks
