The 20 Hour Podcast was a 20 hour livestream version of the QI podcast No Such Thing As A Fish to raise money for Comic Relief. It took place during Red Nose Day 2021 and during the Coronavirus pandemic. It was recorded from various locations in the UK (as with the Working From Home episodes).
It was divided into 35 segments of 35 minutes to celebrate 35 years of Comic Relief. It featured 39 guest stars in total. The podcast raised over £160,000 for Comic Relief.
The majority of the 20 Hour Podcast is only available on YouTube, although the section featuring Richard Osman was released as a podcast episode titled No Such Thing As Enough Money For Comic Relief.
Facts[]
- “In the 1920s and 30s there were many desperate attempts to climb Mount Everest, few more bizarre than Maurice Wilson, whose idea was to fly a plane from Purley to Tibet, crash land it half-way up Everest, and walk the rest of the way to the top.” (Michael Palin)
- “When Hans Christian Andersen went to sleep, he always left a note by the bed which said, ‘I am sleeping—I only appear to be dead.’" (Sandi Toksvig)
- “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was great friends with the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. When he was feeling depressed, he would call her and get her to sing to him down the phone.” (Karen Gibson)
- “Margaret Thatcher had the same nickname as the Eiffel Tower: the Iron Lady.” (Ian Hislop)
- “The first living thing to be named after Twitter was Troglomyces twitteri, a parasite which feeds on the genitals of millipedes.” (Stephen Fry)
- “In 2008, a message was beamed to an Earth-like planet 20 light years away. The messages sent included: a wish to make contact with life forms there, a picture of Richard and Judy, and a message from the band McFly who mainly explained how fit they thought Cheryl Cole was. We know this because we were the ones that sent the message.” (Jamie Morton, Alice Levine, & James Cooper of My Dad Wrote A Porno)
- “Classical concert audiences cough twice as often as non-classical concert audiences.” (Gemma Whelan)
- “The man who wrote the theme tune to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? also wrote ‘Mistletoe and Wine’.” (Richard Osman)
- “After Obama visited Kenya in 2015, many women named their newborns Obama, and one mother named her child Airforceone.” (Sue Perkins)
- “The first woman to run the Boston Marathon was warned by doctors that her uterus would fall out.” (Deborah Frances-White & Athena Kugblenu of The Guilty Feminist)
- “American President Benjamin Harrison’s grandson was once stolen by a goat.” (Rhys Darby)
- “Sea slugs can regenerate every part of their bodies whenever they need to and they can eat the toxic protuberances of other creatures, absorb them into their body, and use them against other enemies.” (Harry Shearer)
- “The moon used to have areas called ‘the land of healthiness’ and the ‘peninsula of insanities’, and the bit Neil Armstrong and his crew landed on was nearly called ‘Sicily’.“ (Dr. Maggie Aderin-Pocock)
- “In 1977, Stanley Kubrick sneaked onto a James Bond set in order to secretly make the lighting better.” (Mark Watson)
- “The city where I was born, Calcutta, got its name by way of an Englishman who misunderstood a conversation.“ (Anuvab Pal)
- “People don’t mind you asking sensitive questions nearly as much as you think they do.” (Stephen J. Dubner)
- “The term ‘dung lung’ for hydrogen sulfide poisoning as a result of exposure to liquid manure was coined by Dr. Robert Crapo.“ (Mary Roach)
- “In the late 1700’s, South Australia was named ‘Napoleonland’ by the French.“ (Shaun Micallef)
- “Parenting and leadership have one thing in common: tough love.” (Angela Duckworth)
- “In 2018, a 500-year-old male skeleton was found in the Thames still wearing his thigh-high leather fisherman boots.” (Corey Taylor)
- “The original blood and bone fertilizer came from whales.” (Hannah Gadsby)
- “The person who coined the term ‘science fiction’ (Hugo Gernsback) also invented a hair-waxing strip.“ (Neil Gaiman)
- “Leyden—a very, very tiny town in western Massachusetts—was the birthplace and home of an extremely thriving New Age cult. It was called ‘The Brotherhood of the Spirit’, and it was founded in a treehouse in Leyden by a guy named Michael Metallica. …Michael was such an asshole they paid him $10,000 to leave.” (John Hodgman)
- “Mixing māori and english, Coca-Cola wrote: ‘kia ora, mate’ on its vending machines in New Zealand. Unfortunately in māori that means ‘hello death’.“ (Angella Dravid)
- “In 1950, a church in Nebraska exploded due to a gas leak. Despite there being a choir practice scheduled at the time, nobody was injured because all 15 members were late—each for a different reason.“ (Tim Minchin)
- “The steam engine and the railway were both invented by the Ancient Greeks but it never occurred to them to put one on top of the other.“ (John Lloyd pt. 1)
- (Carey Mulligan & Emma Freud)
- “56% of people have Googled themselves.“ (Natalie Tran)
- “Megan Markle used to work in a frozen yogurt shop called ‘Humphrey Yogart’.“ (Shaparak Khorsandi)
- “John Milton was the first great poet to describe angels farting …for about five lines in Paradise Lost).“ (Armando Iannucci)
- “There are wild cattle in England, that are owned by no one, have never been touched by human hands, have never seen a vet, and they’ve been hanging out in Chillingham for at least 800 years.” (Philippa Perry)
- “People can have a very rare psychological disorder called ‘boanthropy’ that makes them believe that they are a cow—and they try to live their life as a cow. The most famous sufferer of this condition was Nebuchadnezzar the II, Emperor of the New Babylonian Empire. He went and lived in the fields as a cow for seven years, and ate grass and was bathed with dew …and then he suddenly returned to his rightful mind.” (Sally Phillips & Ronni Ancona)
- “Before plumping for the title Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens toyed with the names Martin Sweetledew, Martin Sweetlebat, Martin Sweetlewag, and Martin Chuzzletoe.” (John Lloyd pt. 2)
- “For a brief period during the war, Churchill slept, bathed, drank champagne, and ate caviar in a disused tube station.“ (Eddie Izzard)
- (Richard Curtis & Emma Freud)
Trivia[]
- This charity event was first announced in TBA.
- The day before this event, the podcast episode Episode 364: No Such Thing As Kylie Minnow was released.
- The segment featuring Richard Osman was released 5 days later as the podcast episode No Such Thing As Enough Money For Comic Relief.
- Reoccuring guest and QI creator John Lloyd makes his fourth appearance. Sandi Toksvig, Stephen Fry, and Rhys Darby all make their third appearances, and Tim Minchin makes his second.
- Other guests included people who had worked with the Fish team before - for example, the Fish team made an appearance on The Guilty Feminist, but this was the first time the hosts of TGF made an appearance on Fish.
- All other guests are making their first appearance, although many of them went on to make further appearances.
- Palin mentions Mallory and Irvine's attempt to climb Everest, which was discussed in Episode 61 and Episode 192.
- Buckminster Fuller's method of sleeping for only two hours a night was discussed in Episode 84.
- MC Hammer being afraid of hammers was an extra fact in No Such Thing As The News: Series 1, Episode 2.
- Schreiber's nickname "Dandan" was revealed in Episode 191.
- Murray mentions a story about Denis Thatcher feeding an elephant from TBA.
- Murray mentions Sir Edmund Barton being called "Toby Tosspot", which is mentioned again in Episode 395.
- Fry mentions vagina dentata, which are part of a headline fact in Episode 303.
- Ptaszynski mentions the association between millipedes and Nazis which was a headline fact in Episode 263.