The QI clan

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The People Behind QI

Here you will find notes on some of the people - past and present - who have helped to make QI what it is.

John Lloyd

Director of Quite Interesting Ltd
Producer of the BBC TV programme QI
Co-author of QI books

John Lloyd

QI is the brainchild of John Lloyd, producer of Not The Nine O'Clock News, Spitting Image and Blackadder. After a promising start at King's School, Canterbury, he went to a pub near Trinity College, Cambridge where he was eventually head-hunted by a man in a beard from the BBC.

In a radical shift of attitude, John spent 15 years working like a maniac. He started The News Quiz, Quote... Unquote, The News Huddlines and To The Manor Born and played a key role in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and Mr Bean, shooting TV commercials in his spare time. For most of the 1980s he went without lunch and slept for four hours a night. He won an absurd number of prizes and got very, very tired.

On Christmas Eve 1993, he came to the sudden and alarming realisation that he didn't really know anything. Changing gear again, he started reading books for the first time since he was 17. To his horror, he discovered that he hadn't been paying attention and, with painful slowness, unearthed the closely guarded secret that the universe is astoundingly quite interesting. This site is the result.

In his gap year, John was a bag-sellotaper in a flour mill. Every evening, after work, he found he was able to produce two tiny homemade scones from his nostrils. This led him to become a fire-extinguisher salesman: a career abruptly truncated when he set fire to a camera shop in Harlow. Moving swiftly on to freelance bath-enamelling, on his first assignment he was unable to get the enamel to dry and fled without payment. To this day, he is haunted by recurring nightmares that the old lady whose bath it was may still be glued to it. He is much happier as a television producer, a job where 98% of the work is done by someone else who knows what they're doing.

John Mitchinson

Director of Research for QI
Co-author of QI books

John Mitchinson

John started off in publishing where he was the marketing manager of Waterstone's. Combining his skills with John Lloyd meant that opening a bookshop in the QI building was inevitable. But what a bookshop!

John is a man who likes to read, eat and drink, and who now gets paid to do all three simultaneously. He started his professional life mixing bath-resurfacing chemicals in a small shed. Since then he has mostly tried to avoid work which involves manual dexterity and poisonous chemicals. His refusal to do anything for very long has left him with several children, a lot of books, one chin too many and a brain his wife refers to as 'the skip'. But he makes good sourdough bread, plants by moonlight, and is one of the few people who knows how to cook a pig's spleen properly.

Piers Fletcher

Question Wrangler

Piers Fletcher

Piers Fletcher is slightly irritated by biographical notes which are expressed in the third person even though they are clearly written by the subject himself - particularly when they contain self-deprecating asides with exclamation marks at the end! Stout, bald, and middle-aged, he is no longer the catch he once was. Easily impressed but uncomfortable in hierarchies, his favourite things are fireworks and kites, while his pet hates are long menus, CD cases with broken hinges, and pets.

No, but seriously: whilst in the army he was put in charge of the northernmost Observation Post in Hong Kong and so would have been the very first opponent the Chinese encountered if they had invaded. They didn't. After spending three years squandering the finest educational opportunity that the City of Oxford could offer, he went on to squander a further twenty-two years as a commodity broker in the City of London. He now writes this and that for a living, as well as researching for the QI TV programme.

He begs to be excused, as he has a lot of catching up to do.

Sarah Lloyd

Company Secretary

Sarah Lloyd

Running QI admin is Sarah Lloyd who, in a previous life as Sarah Wallace, was Publishing Director of Century (now part of the Random House group) and one of the founders of Professional Presentations (now Trinity), which trains and advises more than half of Britain's FTSE 100 companies at every level from junior manager to Chairman. As QI Club Secretary from 2005 to 2007, Sarah really enjoyed the company of over 700 members drawn from every conceivable part of Oxford life. Her proudest recent moment is being part of the Committee who are responsible for re-building the Village Hall at West Hendred (a light airy room with semi-sprung floor available for hire at rock bottom rates...)

Email Sarah (sarah [at] qi [dot] com)

The QI Elves

Researching, researching, researching

The QI Elves research and write questions for the BBC television programme QI, and attend recordings to clear up any stray panel questions, loose factual ends and green room drinks.

Current Elves

The following people were responsible for researching and writing questions for the fifth (2007) series of QI:

Previous Elves

The following Elves helped research previous series of QI:

Striving for QI Elfhood?

If you would like to work as a QI Elf, helping research QI and working on the recordings, a good place to start is on the QI Talk Forums.

Website credits

Design & content: Christopher Gray

Technical guru: Kieran Topping

Photography: Marina Illum

With many thanks to Ken Plume.