No Such Thing As A Fish interview
The award-winning podcast No Such Thing As A Fish gets 1.2 million downloads a week, has been transformed into the spin-off topical BBC2 TV series No Such Thing As The News and was named one of iTunes’s top ten most downloaded podcasts of 2016. Andrew Hunter Murray and Anna Ptaszynski – half of the panel – speak with Victoria Nangle
Working with QI seems to be a very organic environment, with branches like NSTAAF podcast, books, shows all fostered by curiosity.
Is this the case, or am I just romanticising?
Andrew: No, that’s pretty much it. We all love working on the different areas and they’re all satisfying in different ways. Our new book, The Book of the Year, is an A-Z of the most amazing events in 2017 – but that was a spin-off from our TV show last year, No Such Thing As The News. Every project gives us new idea for the next one.
credit: Olly Burn
Anna: It helps that we’ve always been given a lot of freedom at QI, and space to branch out from one thing to the next and try out new ideas. A lot of the branches lead nowhere, and the ideas often turn out to be completely stupid, but none of what we’ve done could have happened if we hadn’t been given that opportunity to experiment.
“ This year 2,000 bees were stolen in the town of Beeston ”
How do you select the topics that you’ll be covering in each show?
Anna: The choice is fact-led, not topic led, and we all have our different ways of finding new facts. It might be something we’ve seen in a museum, or heard on the radio, or read in a book or magazine (and yes, okay, we occasionally use the internet too). Then whatever facts come from that process, the topics spring from those facts. For instance, today I discovered that sheep have been taught specifically to recognise the faces of Jake Gyllenhaal, Barack Obama, Emma Watson, and Fiona Bruce, so I suspect we’ll soon be covering the topics of sheep and facial recognition.
Andrew: Yes, it really is as simple as us emailing our favourite facts to each other. James might find out, for example, that this year 2,000 bees were stolen in the town of Beeston. Then we go off and do our own homework, and when we meet up we’ve all got completely different research on the same fact.
How does the live recording compare to the regular podcasts in prep and interaction?
Andrew: The live shows are much more raucous than the office shows, which is inevitable when you’ve got 500 people laughing along with you in the room. So they get a bit more crazy. But the interaction between the four of us is pretty much the same wherever we are.
Anna: Yep, although with the live shows we probably err on the side of lighter, funnier facts rather than interesting-but-serious. The sound of an audience’s eyebrows being raised in appreciation is not as encouraging, from a performer’s perspective, as the sound of people laughing.
Will you be making more series of No Such Thing As The News?
Andrew: We would absolutely love to – it is one of the things we’re proudest of and we think it was a really innovative new version of the old-school panel show. It was brilliant fun to watch, cheap as chips to make, and dynamite in a late-night slot. Tony Hall, you have our phone number.
Anna: Does he have it? We should check that he has it. Maybe that’s why he hasn’t been in touch.
What are your favourite questions that you’ve yet to find the answers to?
Andrew: Where does our colleague Dan get his facts from? They are all about Yeti, Nessie, and the Mongolian Death Worm, and yet many of them have no sources whatsoever. That, I would say, is the greatest mystery of all.
Anna: Will we ever crack time travel? What happens when we die? How do washing machines make socks disappear? Would Friends be a huge let down if they brought it back? The usuals.
No Such Thing As A Fish, Brighton Dome, Sunday Thursday 1 March 2018, 8pm, £19/17
