Review: No Such Thing as a Fish, Colston Hall

There’s an indescribable pleasure in hearing a good fact – a pleasure surpassed only by serving it up again later, repurposed for the advancement of your own social standing.

For those not familiar, the No Such Thing as a Fish podcast comes from the four ‘QI elves’ who work furiously behind the scenes to provide all the facts for the TV show. But in their diligence, they became so fact-laden that they started a podcast in which to store all the spare factage, like a spare room to hoard all their surplus factoid gold.

That was exactly four years ago, so on Friday night they were celebrating – not only because of their birthday, but also because the Colston Hall was the largest show they have ever played. The excitement was palpable: each had brought their own PowerPoint presentation, with a special section called BRISTOL, emblazoned in Comic Sans.

The juicy local factlets included the tale of a suspicious package outside the Territorial Army in Bristol which was blown up by an Army bomb disposal unit, who then discovered it was a box of leaflets on how to deal with suspicious packages.

With less irony but no less hilarity, they revealed that Tricky taught Samantha Cameron how to play pool and that David Prowse, the Bristolian who played the body of Darth Vader, penned an autobiography titled Straight From the Force’s Mouth.

They also discussed the Bristol Post’s ‘slightly optimistic’ list of things invented in the city, which claimed that the first ever test tube baby, despite being born in Oldham, was ‘originally’ from Bristol. They questioned how this was possible and then proceeded to riff off it by claiming for the rest of the show that everything was invented in Bristol.

The joy of both the podcast and the live show is a combination of comedy and sheer breadth of research and knowledge. The conversation moved swiftly from the surprising frequency of people crashing their cars into branches of Specsavers, to how not to get eaten by black and brown bears (depending on the type of bear, it’s either playing dead or absolutely not playing dead, but they are basically indistinguishable except for their claws, so if in doubt just get a bit closer).

Never shying from the racier side of data, James Harkin revealed that Pornhub’s usage in Hawaii dropped by 80% after the false missile warning was issued in January of this year. But once the all-clear was given, people celebrated: usage was 40% up on the original figure before the confusion.

Anna Ptaszynski finished on the fact that in rage rooms, the thing that people request to smash up most are printers. To this, Andrew Hunter Murray responded that, funnily enough, the world’s first ever rage room could be found (and we’re back to Bristol!) aboard the SS Great Britain…

No Such Thing as a Fish Colston Hall Friday, March 9. For more on the podcast, visit qi.com/podcast

Read more: Bristol Comedy Garden 2018 lineup announced