QI E04 Recording Review

*This is episode E01 in the Autumn transmission order.

The fourth episode was hilarious, certainly the funniest that I've seen so far this series. I also have a lot more to tell you about at the end, so keep reading.

This time I didn't enter through either of the main doors. For this episode I entered through the front of the building and reported to reception. Of course that means that I don't really know what was going on in the queue last night (if someone wants to add a comment to this post, please do). Stephen Grant told me that fewer people were turned away on this occasion, just over a hundred. That's still a lot. However, a reliable source told me that Stephen's figure for the first show was not accurate. It wasn't 300 people who were turned away but 500 (which is about the same as the capacity of the studio). Considering that not all the tickets issued would have been used, you can see that the whole audience and more is double booked.

Stephen Grant's warm up was cut short last night. The audience were required to produce the sounds for the buzzers in a future episode (the audience of the second show on series D were also required to do this) which cut down his act. We'll look forward to his return and I am intrigued by how his stand in will perform next week.

Now for the spoilers. You should have worked out what to do by now, just highlight the text below if you want to read it. The first paragraph lists the guests if that is all that you want to know. If you want to, skip down to read about the green room.

The guests for EpE04 were Jimmy Carr, Rob Brydon and (as you already know) Bill Bailey. All of them performed excellently, including Alan. Stephen was rather teased for some reading trouble. I'll say no more since I think this might make the cut.

The topic for the evening was Engineering. The subjects (to the best of my memory) included Trains, More Trains, Bridges, Buildings, Tunnels, Facades, Nukes and AI.

Stephen had a toy train in which he placed sweets to send to those that got questions right. Alan delighted in sending his sweets to the audience (toffees are not ideal whilst you're on stage) although they never made it past the second row.

After the show me and my guest (Lucwhostalking on the QI forum) headed into the green room. If you don't know, a green room is where all of the stars and such hang around before and after a show (there's also a bar with free drinks). For fairly obvious reasons much of what is said in the green room should stay there. However, I can tell you that everyone on the show (with the exception of [highlight:] Jimmy Carr) was there as well as many of the elves. I had a very good chat with John Lloyd (the producer) as well as Flash (an elf) and James (Eggshaped) who most of you will know either from the forum or the posts that he has added here.

Now it is fair to say that neither Luc or me have ever experienced anything like the green room before and we were both rather out of our depth. Hence I didn't have much of a chance to chat with any of the guests in the short time I was there before I needed to catch the last train home. However, it will certainly be something that I remember for a long time.

Andrew will be back next week with one of the reviews (I don't 100% know which one yet).

I'll also add that next weekend (Saturday 26th and Sunday 27th May) UKTV Gold 2 is doing a marathon of QI with 18 episodes over the two days. If you get that channel, don't forget to watch. There are details at the bottom of the blog.