Anna Ptaszynski

  • Researcher, script editor and comedian

Press clippings Page 5

The first ever No Such Thing As A Fish Halloween Special (the QI Elves podcast) is full of delightfully spooky research topics to unravel, and is still a great listen some time later due to Halloween traditions having exceptionally strange origins. The holiday itself was once on the much less spooky May 12th, for instance, because it came before All Saints Day and that holiday did not stay in one place. But in addition to the research the chemistry on the podcast is truly starting to bloom. While it holds a lot in common with the fantastic American podcast Stuff You Missed In History Class, No Such Thing As A Fish is capitalizing heavily on its recent live show in a pub. The hosts are much quicker to dig into each other's theories and opinions than they were only a few months ago when their podcast started. Anna Ptaszynski doesn't just introduce a story about Kesha and her habit of having sex with ghosts, she teases her cohosts with the question of whether everyone knows who she is, so by the time she's read her Ke$ha ghost sex tidbit her cohosts are ready to go with riffs about mythological succubi. Stories about bobbing for apples as a way of selecting a spouse are also delightful, and perhaps most entertaining is the fact that witches once had the tradition of using the end of a broomstick to apply hallucinogenics anally, hence "flying on broomsticks." The dark facts combined with the funnier than ever pacing make this a heck of an installment.

Dan Telfer, The AV Club, 10th November 2014

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