The QI Elves - Funny You Should Ask . . .

Foreword
by Zoe Ball

In my day job Im faced with a string of impossible questions. Whats going on? courtesy of Marvin Gaye. How will I know? from Whitney Houston. Why do fools fall in love? Whats the frequency, Kenneth? (and who on Earth is Kenneth?) Whats new pussycat? Is there life on Mars?

Fortunately for my morning-addled self, I dont have to answer these I just get to play the records. Although I am pretty sure that no one has found any life on Mars. Yet.

But its not just the pop stars who are forever asking questions. All of us have this insatiable thirst for knowledge, whether about black holes (see page 212) or toilet rolls (see page 5). Thats what inspired us to start the Why Workshop segment on the BBC Radio 2 Breakfast Show. In amongst the songs, we wanted listeners to learn something from our little programme. And so, every week, we invite them to send us their latest ponderings and wonderings, no matter how big, small, silly or bizarre, and we satisfy them as best we can.

Well, technically I dont; thats where my crack team of barnstormingly brilliant QI Elves come in. Who better to answer our listeners questions than the researchers behind QI, that fount of weird and wonderful information? Every week for the past 18 months theyve chased down countless rabbit holes and always emerged not only with the answers, but with armfuls of extra facts and revelations. This book is bursting with the best of those, plus so much more that we never had time to discuss on air.

I always wish we had longer to talk to the Elves on the radio. Every answer they give immediately spawns ten more questions that I want to ask. Ive always been more of a questioner than an answerer. I was quite annoying at school, with my hand up all the time in class, wanting to ask just one more thing (until adolescence tricked me into thinking that chasing boys and painting my hair yellow was more urgent than interrogating my teachers). Still today, I find myself being sucked down information wormholes and spending hours hunting for answers to things Im not remotely meant to be working on.

And now, as a parent, Ive also got my kids asking me the impossible questions. Thats why I love that many of the contributions in this book come from children probably those same ones who are still putting their hands up, even after the bell rings. Now that I have a couple of my own Ive realised that you can usually depend on them to ask the most thought-provoking or infuriating, depending on how busy things are questions. And when theyre young they genuinely think youll know the answers to all of them. Its a real perk of parenting. Not only does it give you a thrilling sense of power, but it also means that you actually have to go and discover the answers to make sure they keep believing in your all-knowing abilities for as long as possible. And its finding out those answers thats the real treat.

That said, I must admit that sometimes I cheat when my kids questions become too challenging, and I get my dad on the phone. Hes built a career on making information accessible to children, so hes a secret weapon in that respect. He was always completely convinced that learning should never be something laborious or a duty, that it was meant to be fun. He instilled that in us kids from an early age, sometimes to the detriment of our schoolwork. A simple question about why x = y when I was stuck on my maths homework would result in hours of discussion, heading back to Archimedes supposedly leaping from his bath and shrieking, Eureka! Fascinating, but not much help with my algebra.

Its those tangents that stick with you, though. Sometimes its not the question itself, or even the immediate answer to it, but the unexpected directions it bounds off into that amaze you the most. A subject might not sound promising at the outset, but youre astonished by where it ends up. I guarantee youll be astonished at where the answers take you. I dont know of another book thatll tell you about Michael Phelpss swimming race against a shark one minute (see page 88), the Guinness World Record for the most belly-button fluff the next (see page 144), and then go on to reveal the number thats the answer to life, the universe and everything (spoiler: its not 42! See page 180).

Above all, this book is a chance to pause, sit back and marvel at our amazing world. Most of us lead such busy, frantic lives, and in any breaks we get were blasted with news and facts and figures from all directions. It was either the Elves or my dad who told me that theres more information in one edition of the New York Times than the average person in the 17th century would have come across in a lifetime. And we barely allow ourselves to take a breath as we try to absorb it all. My recommendation is that whenever those day-to-day stresses start to overwhelm you, hit pause. Put down your phone or laptop. Turn off those news alerts and dont tell my producer that I said this! switch off the radio. Stop running around after the kids for five minutes, or worrying about work or what to make for dinner. Then pick up this book. Everything in here provides a blissful distraction from those daily anxieties, and a reminder of the extraordinary science, nature, history, humanity and everyday wonders that surround us.

And if you need another reason to read on, do it so that you can discover more questions of your own. Just like I do when I speak to the Elves each week, youll come away with ten more questions for every answer you read, and thats a brilliant gift. Its because humans are so obsessively curious that they produced all the incredible ideas, inventions, art and technology that make our lives what they are today. We got to where we are because we kept on asking questions, so why stop now?

As the 18th-century philosopher Voltaire said, you should judge a person by their questions rather than their answers, and by that measure The Zoe Ball Breakfast Shows listeners are nothing short of exceptional.

Every Wednesday since the Why Workshop launched in January 2019, the QI Elves (who usually research and write for BBC Twos QI) have been let loose on BBC Radio 2 listeners queries and tasked with finding the answers to conundrums such as Who alphabetised the alphabet?, Which fruit came first, the grape or the grapefruit? and Duvets have tog ratings, but what is a tog?

This is the complete opposite of the way the Elves usually work. On QI, we look for an interesting answer first, and then try and find a question to fit it. Starting with the question takes longer because the minute you start looking into any subject, it immediately starts throwing up more questions.

For example, once wed uncovered why squirrel-proof bird food is covered in chilli, we immediately wanted to know why humans want to eat chilli in the first place. And once we investigated in which order to top a scone with jam and cream, we then wondered which is the correct way to make your accompanying cuppa tea first or milk first?

In this book youll find our favourite questions posed by Radio 2s listeners, as well as the tangential questions and extraordinary facts that we uncovered along the way. There are also some brand-new questions where we took inspiration from the philosophical (If aliens were watching Earth, what would they think of us?), the playful (Why does treading on LEGO hurt so much?) and the everyday (We dont have Coke, is Pepsi okay?).