My aim for the podcast recommendations has always been to bring you a list of podcasts that I don’t think are as popular as they deserve. So when it comes to determining a podcast’s popularity it is very hard. Sure you can go off the iTunes charts but you have to take into account that not everyone is a slave to the Apple system and there are a multitude of alternative sources. Due to that I tend to go off word of mouth, which podcasts break through the internet barrier and splash right into the office water cooler? Hamish and Andy have the advantage of the number one radio show in Australia so of course they are right up there along with Serial, the Breaking Bad of podcasts, WTF With Marc Maron, This American Life and Welcome To Nightvale. That’s enough backpedaling for me to talk about a consistently chart topping podcast right?
No Such Thing As A Fish
QI is no longer just a charming BBC panel show, with international tours, book series and now podcasts it has become a fully fledged edutainment empire. If you are looking for the key to that success you don’t have to go much further than that first sentence…edutainment. Any form of entertaining that is also educational is on to something, just take a look at Youtube. Hundreds of channels are aiming for the perfect mixture of the two, that way teachers can trick their kids into thinking they get to watch Youtube in class, while the kids…get to watch Youtube in class. Although, the real leader of edutainment has got to be QI so their attempt at podcasting must be winner.
No Such Thing Is A Fish is a podcast concerning the quite interesting facts that the elves never got to ram into the television show. Each elf gets a chance to throw out their interesting fact for the week and then they all take part in a fact off in between the other elves’ facts with jokes flying all over the room. The show’s regular elves include the show’s semi-Australian, infrequent stand-up comedian host, Dan Schreiber, James Harkin, who may well know more useless facts than Stephen Fry, Andy Murray (not that one) and Anna Ptaszynski, who apart from having one of the coolest surnames ever isn’t on Twitter but don’t go on about it.
The beauty of No Such Thing As A Fish is that as well as the interesting facts it gives you an understanding of how much work goes into QI behind the scenes. It is also a very funny show and while Stephen Fry, Alan Davies or any of the regular panelists never make an appearance, the laugh count is up there with the actual television show. Of course when it comes down to it, you come for the facts and No Such Thing As A Fish is pack full of them. I mean who doesn’t like interestingly pointless facts, that’s how I survive social situations. For example, did you know; there is a Finnish meatball company that was discovered to contain no meat in there meatballs so had to change their name to “Balls” and that tiger beetles run so fast that they make themselves temporarily blind? Do you love me now? Both of those delicious facts come from No Such Thing As The Fish by the way, alright delicious one is probably the wrong word to use when it comes to the balls fact but they are fascinating.
No Such Thing As A Fish is a fairly new podcast that only started in March last year but the show keeps to a regular weekly schedule and has now almost made eighty episodes. Yet after all those episodes, I still don’t quite understand the title, except for the fact that a book called, “The Oxford Dictionary Of Underwater Life” apparently says in the first paragraph that there is no such thing as a fish. So if you are struggling for small talk or you just want to fool your kids into some edutainment, wrap your ears around this apparently non existent fish of a podcast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pKLNnsU6dQ
This video is so great it’s worth posting as well, it goes a little bit more to explain why there is no such thing as a fish.
