QI – G season, Show – Green
On Friday evening I was lucky enough to attend the recording of TV Show QI hosted by Stephen Fry. If you want tickets you can apply to the reserve list on Applause Store. However I was on the reserve list for around two years until I got the chance to apply for tickets and even then you might got get them! As tickets are free Applause Store give out more tickets than seats as many people don’t turn up. I don’t think this is the case for QI though and although we arrived two hours early we were already queuing back on the road, I was a little worried whether we would get in as previously queuing for Have I got News for You, it took a long time for the queue to become that long. Fortunately though QI use the main studio and there was seating for 550 people. We had very good seats about four rows back just to the right.
QI - (not the episode I saw)
Stop reading now to avoid spoilers!
So the show we attended was QI Season 7 (G Season) episode 6 – GREEN. There was a short warm up, basically the comedian asked where people had come from and then told country related jokes. One audience member had come from Norway. When asked what he had come to the UK for (holiday / work etc) he had come just to watch QI.
So Stephen Fry came out first and introduced himself and the show. He asked us all to participate in an AudioBoo, every show he twitters a IPhone audio recording of the audience shouting out a word and then his followers (or as he said then quickly recanted disciples) then they have to guess what the word is and it’s meaning. The word we shouted was “ginglymus” you can find the sound clip here. If you’re wondering Ginglymus means hinge joint.
Stephen Fry then introduced the rest of the players one by one each telling a brief story as they came on. This weeks players were Danny Baker, Jeremy Clarkson, Bill Bailey and of course Alan Davies! I don’t think you could have picked a better four players, we were very lucky to see them.
I won’t spoil the questions but the recording lasted just under 3 hours and I was constantly amazed at the knowledge of all of the players, and some of the random connections they made, they started with a question about the metal Palladium and finished somehow reached the film Goldfinger after 4 or 5 subject changes!
One surprise was the screens behind the players. On TV they look so crystal clear, almost blue screened on after filming but actually they are rear projectors. At our show I notice a couple of times the screen behind Alan Davies flicker. Then halfway through the show the white appeared green. The projector had failed. This is something they had never experienced before and have no backup for! While behind the scenes the producers were discussing what to do, Bill Bailey and Alan Davies jokingly picked up their chairs and went and sat next to Jeremy and Danny. Jeremy joked that as this was a Green show they should say they turned off the screen to save power. So they filmed a segment of Jeremy saying the screen should be turned off and the others moving round. It looked terribly contrived at the time but will be interesting to see on TV.
The show is coming back to TV in the winter, hence there was a running joke throughout the recording about “being in the future”. They kept making references to “the past” such as, The New Star Trek film, then one of them jumped in, well it’s old now but those DVD extras are amazing! Or one player mentioned swine flu, and another interrupted and said he didn’t think it was an appropriate subject to joke about with the 3 billion people who died from it.
I had a great time at the QI recording and would recommend it to anyone (just so hard to get tickets). I’ll be looking out for the show later this year on TV!
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