The QI Elves are to get their own show, produced for BBC News by John Lloyd. No Such Thing As The News is a topical, television version of the hugely successful QI podcast No Such Thing As A Fish. It will be broadcast on BBC2 beginning in May.
In 110 weekly editions since its launch in 2014, No Such Thing As A Fish has been downloaded 25 million times and attracted 715,000 subscribers. It won iTunes’ ‘Best New Podcast’ award in 2014 and the Chortle Online award in 2015 & 2016. It has toured theatres in Britain and the world (well, Belgium), sold out the Lyric in London’s West End, and released a vinyl album.
No Such Thing As The News promises to be fast, intelligent, hilarious television, completely unlike any other show on air. It’s about contemporary events, but it’s not ‘satire’. It aims to do for the news what QI does for the universe at large: making the apparently dull interesting, the obscure clear and the frightening comprehensible.
The formula is simple. Four young QI researchers – known by Stephen Fry’s affectionate nickname as ‘The QI Elves’ – tell each other the most interesting things they’ve discovered in the news that week. They are likeable, ordinary, unpretentious, inveterately curious, prodigiously well briefed and extremely funny. They don’t claim to be journalists and they don’t look like newsreaders, but their take on the world is as accurate as any. Not bound by the conventions accepted everywhere else, No Such Thing As The News may not look like the news, but you are certain to find yourself strangely better informed.
No Such Thing As The News features James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Ptaszynski and Dan Schreiber. It is produced for BBC News by John Lloyd, legendary creator of The News Quiz, Spitting Image, Blackadder and QI, and edited by Keith Blackmore, Managing Editor of BBC News and Current Affairs.
John Lloyd comments: ‘The last time I started a topical TV comedy show with four exceptionally talented but completely unknown stars was Not The Nine O’Clock News in 1979. No Such Thing As The News is radically different but equally exciting – and 37 years younger.’
James Harding, Director of BBC News, says: ‘This is news for people who don’t watch the news – as well as those who do. We’ll give viewers a sideways look at the big stories of the week. John Lloyd is a comic talent second to none, and we’re delighted to have him on board.’
Filmed each Thursday over 5 weeks in front of a live audience at a comedy club in Greenwich, No Such Thing As The News will air the following night (Fridays) at 11pm on BBC Two. It will also be available online.
