QI

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.

Radio Times review

You can debate the virtues of the ideal QI guest, but this is a pretty perfect line-up. Sara Pascoe, Bill Bailey and Rev Richard Coles all have so much to chip in and riff about that the programme reaches that QI plateau where the questions feel almost like an interruption to the general flow of drollery.

Pascoe has astonishing facts about rats' love lives, Bailey objects to the phrase "the birds and the bees" on the basis that bees are "sexless lackeys for a monstrous sugar giant" and Coles ponders the uselessness of a tie rack in a vicarage. He also enlightens us on what it means to be soundly firked. That's firked.

Radio Times review

Those who were offended by the childish "poo and willies" humour of a recent QI won't be thrilled to hear mention of male and female genitalia, pubic hair and prostitution in tonight's edition. But not to tune in would mean missing some genuinely laugh-out-loud moments, including Alan Davies wearing antique glasses for those with poor peripheral vision. You'd also miss Stephen Fry apoplectic with embarrassment at having accidentally described Jo Brand as an ignorant pig. And you wouldn't know how impossible it is to twirl your right foot clockwise while trying to draw a six in the air with your right hand. Bet you're trying to do that right now.

Radio Times review

Sue Perkins appears to be taking this edition incredibly seriously, frowning as she unpicks the brainteasers and listening intently to Stephen Fry's elucidations as if she was the classroom swot thirsty for every drop of knowledge. That is until he poses the question how did Chicago get screwed up, to which she flippantly replies: "They put Catherine Zeta-Jones in it."

The lavatorial round may send you running towards the smallest room because the explanation is so nauseating even the panellists shriek in horror. But stick around for the quantum levitation demonstration. It's childishly and joyously brilliant. Josh Widdicombe's right when he says: "That would be the best Christmas present in the world!"

Where do QI get their facts and figures from?

Going in search of weird and wonderful facts can take you to Hawaii or the Himalayas - but you're just as likely to find geek gold in Wigan, writes QI elf James Harkin.

Radio Times review

In honour of guest Victoria Coren Mitchell, QI goes off-grid and includes an Only Connect round. The most shocking thing to emerge from this dramatic deviation from the norm is that Alan Davies has never managed to sit through an entire episode of the BBC Two brainiac quiz.

It will surprise no one to learn that Jack Whitehall takes over the proceedings completely for his usual Whitehall farce, though you can't dislike him for it. He's funny, particularly when discussing his dad's disapproval of his son's bromance with host Stephen Fry.

Elsewhere, we learn the connection between PG Wodehouse and Sherlock Holmes - and did you know that a quarter of the people who claim to have read 1984 are lying?

Radio Times review

Usually the QI panelists scrabble about improvising madly as they try to answer Stephen Fry's abstruse questions. Yet both Johnny Vegas and Jason Manford come up with a correct answer (and in Manford's case an impressively comprehensive one) almost immediately. Are the guests getting smarter or the questions easier? Aisling Bea and regular Alan Davies can't compete with such esoteric knowledge. In fact she almost gives up after hearing about a strange northern pursuit involving larded-up legs. "The more I get to know you, the more I think you men are mad," she states. Oh, and you'll never think of the word "sufficient" in the same way after Vegas's revelation.

Project built by students at University of Bath on QI

A metal maze built by physics students at The University of Bath will feature on the BBC Two programme QI this week.

John Lloyd investigates if teachers use QI facts

While gearing up for the new series of our long-running quiz show QI, we put a call out on Twitter asking if teachers ever used facts from books and television programmes in their lessons.

We've reached "L". Lordy. That's some longevity, right there. However, to make things a little less lumbering, question maestro Stephen Fry is concentrating only on the animal kingdom tonight: from lonely whales to larval locomotives. And possibly lolloping lorikeets, lecherous lions and lesser mouse lemurs. Guests Sarah Millican, Ross Noble and Colin Lane join resident fixture Alan Davies.