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QI takes two whole hours to record. That’s not two hours of stopping, stalling and chopping bits out, but two hours of full-on, unbroken chat. I know because we got tickets to see a recording tonight, at the London Studios on the South Bank.

The show, now in its sixth year, was all about the letter F (series one was about the letter A, series two about B and so on), with this particular episode majoring on Families, as it’s due to go out on Children in Need night. That was strange enough, as the studio was decorated with Pudsey Bears and it won’t go out until November. Last week, though, they did the Christmas episode which must have been even stranger.

Anyhow, being Children in Need night they had Terry Wogan on as a surprise guest. A bit hmmm, but at least they balanced him out with Ronnie Ancona and David Mitchell (and Alan Davis, of course).

We were lucky to get in. Doors opened at quarter to seven, and we were told to get queueing (beside the people for Have I Got News For You) from five, but that doesn’t really work with general office hours, so we were much later than that. When we got there they were queueing around the block, with burger and ice cream vans doing a good trade by the kerbside. But of course we did get in, although only by the skins of our collective teeth: just a few spots further back and we’d have been turned away.

As ever with these things, once we got inside we found everything to be smaller and slightly tattier than it is on TV. We also found it hard to work out what would make it to air out of the two-hour recording. I’m guessing Wogan’s admission that he can understand why a parent would flip out at their crying child would most likely be trimmed, though, as this will be shown in the news break of a charity show about child abuse and poverty that he himself will be hosting.

He seemed to have calmed down about the Eurovision voting, acknowledging that countries that share similar musical tastes will probably vote for each other. That’s not what he was intimating at the end of this year’s contest.

But it was a fun night and I’ll tune in on 14th November to see how they manage to squash down 120 minutes of recordings into 30 minutes of airtime. By then I’ll probably not remember much of what we saw live, so I doubt I’ll spot the cuts.

I’ll probably forget the surprise guest, too.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Media, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.