Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4180 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-01
• Binding: Hardcover
• 96 pages

Synopsis
Imagine an edition of "The Guinness Book of Records" selected by a panel of stand-up comedians..."The QI Annual 2008" is packed with original contributions from Stephen Fry, Alan Davies, Jo Brand, Bill Bailey and other regular guests on the show, with games to play at home, puzzles, cartoon strips, mini-encyclopaedias, how-to diagrams and masses of QI facts. If you want to read Julian Clary's poetry about the Queen, Roger Law's musings on flatulent kangaroos, or have often wondered how you might make a waterproof apron out of a whale's foreskin, your Christmas gift dilemma has just been solved. Warning: very silly indeed. Will offend dullards, whales and parents in no particular order.

Customer Reviews

Amazing
If you like the series, then you will love the book. It is split in very small pieces of information, which makes it ideal for commuting. I recommend it!

Barely interesting and doesn't transfer
I love the TV show QI. I'm a fan of most of the guests, have seen several in live gigs or else read a number of their various books, I've got the first series box set, the first DVD game and the Book of General Ignorance. Like I say, I'm a fan.

I'm also a fan of the TV comedy spin-off book - the Goodies books, the Young Ones, Morcambe and Wise, the New Statesman for example - were all grab bags of daft snippets, spoof documents, and other original material. This is genre of book which seemed to have gone out of favour for a while but has come back well lately with Al Murray's Pub Landlord's Book of British Common Sense and Borat's Touristic Guidings.

The QI Annual is along similar lines. It is stylishly presented - having a nice Beano annual look - and the contents are a more or less original miscellany of sideways-looking snippets, interesting facts and articles.

There are, to my mind, two vital ingredients to the concept and the appeal of QI: one is the spontaneous interplay between the guests and the other is the overturning of received wisdom. The currency of the show - its interesting facts - are usually all the more interesting because they are so little-known and bizarre or because they refute commonly held 'knowledge'. Both of these key ingredients are totally absent from the book.

The guest interplay is of course impossible to reflect in an annual but that needn't have undermined the QI Annual necessarily if the trivia was interesting and humorously communicated, but it's not. It's decidely dull and mundane. Jeremy Clarkson contributes a heavily padded out section, the basic gist of which is that people around the world eat stuff like dogs, guinea pigs and insects - hardly news to anyone. Clive Anderson delivers an essay on the English Elm...that's it...no angle, no punchline...just a dry couple of pages about an inappropriately named species of tree.

There are brief moments of edutainment (the spoof, Boys Own style cartoon adventures of Stephen Fry for example) but essentially this is a very shallow, sketchy sub-Schott book of unfunny, widely known trivia. If the book was not associated with the TV series, and the same content was compiled and attributed to some nobody researcher, then I doubt it would get published.

A very nice Annual for the series
A very nice read with plenty of toilet humour and interesting facts to impress your friends. To be honest some of he features of members from the show seem to lack any actual input from them at all as they cover random subjects like the Elm tree and What animals you wouldnt normally eat but still a very nice giggle at the end of the day and any fan of the show should own it