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Ahead of a brand new current affairs series brought to you by the QI Elves, we spoke to 'No Such Thing as the News' presenters James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Ptaszynski and Dan Schreiber. 

'No Such Thing as the News' is based on your podcast 'No Such Thing as a Fish'. Tell us about the podcast for those of us who (er ... sorry) haven't heard it before.

Dan: The idea behind the podcast really came from our work as researchers on QI. So we’re constantly looking for interesting facts.  I think the nature of how we talk generally in day to day discourse is that we normally start with ‘Oh, did you know?’ So, we’re having these conversations in the office where we work. Anything that doesn’t make it to a QI script was getting lost. So we were thinking that the conversations we were having as researchers were really fact-packed and fun. What would happen if we tried recording it? So we tried recording it and then we ended up doing it regularly.

James: Yeah, we accidentally released it, didn’t we?

Dan: Yep, we really did. We were making it as a pilot to show to John Lloyd. We transferred it to John via a Soundcloud account but we’d left it open to everyone. You, James, mentioned it to a few of your friends on Twitter, and before we knew what was going on we had hundreds of listeners.

What do you think accounted for that initial surge in popularity?

Anna Ptaszynski: One thing which was really helpful was that John Lloyd who had started the original QI Twitter feed had been tweeting interesting facts twice a day. That feed now has 800,000 followers. That was a really useful springboard. I think the growth in the audience is really fantastic – there are a lot of people who listen to the podcast who don’t necessarily listen to QI.

Dan: I think it’s a good pub-type conversation. There are no opinions, or angles, or comedy. We really just chat through facts. We’ll just have a conversation on the podcast where one person will say one fact and someone else will throw something else in. I think people who are listening like learning new facts and they like hearing us just having a conversation.

I think too that people who are listening were interested in hearing who exactly us QI Elves were – we have Stephen Fry to thank for that for introducing the idea of the QI Elves in the TV show. That might have been a bit of the attraction for new listeners.

What sort of person is a QI Elf? They sound very hard-working and instantly likeable. Do you recognise something of yourself in the label you’ve been given?

James: I think a QI Elf is a particular kind of person. They read everything they can find. They’re really curious and interested in things. Whenever they see that one fact that makes you go ‘wow’, its not that they just read it, they want to share it with one another. And I think that’s something we have in common with each other actually.

How did you go from podcast to TV? Was that a straightforward, ‘no-brainer’ kind of idea?

Dan: We’ve been going for two years now. There’s been little progressions which have take us to this place. So for a long time we’ve been recording the podcast in the office all together. Then we started to think about how it might work in front of a live audience. So, we tried that and then the event grew and grew, and we started doing bigger shows with a slightly more visual element.

Then we had an opportunity to do a live event at a comedy venue in Greenwich so we tried out filming it with a view to putting it on YouTube. When we edited the video together we realised that we had something really interesting. It looked really good to us.

John Lloyd had a look at it too. He liked it. And that’s when we started thinking with him, ‘well, if we were to make this a TV show, what would make it a good TV show?’ That’s when we started thinking that the best place to start would be picking out something topical from each week and talking about the fascinating facts which emerge from those topical stories. When we’d agreed on that idea, that’s when we pitched the idea. It all happened really quite quickly from there.

How do you know when something is interesting? It depends on whether the audience knows it already. So how do you know?  

James: I’ve been doing QI for about 12 years and I think you just get a nose for it. It’s just something you discover which when you’ve discovered it you want to tell other people. It may sound rather twee, but it’s the sort of thing where if I find it interesting I’m hoping that other people find it interesting as well. You have to trust that’s going to happen.

Anna: It’s not a foolproof process necessarily. I think everyone knows what’s interesting really. When you’re in a group of people and you’ve got something that you really really want to share because you know they will also find it interesting, then that’s the one. Everyone instinctively knows that. It’s just about reading through loads and loads of material and being really brutal, identifying that information that you would share with eight people in a pub and they wouldn’t be bored or feigning interest.

James: It’s a bit like a joke. The way you phrase a fact is that there has to be things in there which people already understand. And then there needs to be a pay-off which is the thing they haven’t heard before. It’s about taking the mundane or the familiar, and then doing a twist on it.

Dan: I think its got to be personal. You’ve got to find it interesting otherwise why would you share it? It’s a gut thing. I think we’re all basically Jedis and we were born with the force. 

• '' begins on Friday 20 May 2016 at 11.05pm on 主播大秀 Two