Quite Interesting: QI and The English Psyche
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge - Bertrand Russell
This original focus of this blog was going to be my experiences as a clueless yet endearing Ausländer as I bumbled my way through the German Hauptstadt. Yet my attention span has been known to resemble that of a CSI director, and I have occasionally been distracted by Scandinavian Gothic, coffee nomenclature and Frida Kahlo, their connections to Berlin rather tenuous, although still stronger, I guess, than CSI’s take on forensics. This entry is another of those detours into the intellectual wilderness, as I take my rather casual approach to anthropology (it does rely too heavily on wine-induced epiphanies) and mull over my former hosts across the Atlantic. Specifically, I’ve been pondering about the quintessentially English phenomenon that is QI and what it reveals about the Anglosaxon psyche.
“QI” stands for “quite interesting” and is one of those typical BBC2 quizzes where scores are frankly unimportant and questions serve as vehicles for some major unashamed British quipping. At the helm of this quipping orgy is the King Quipper himself, Stephen Fry, who wears his wisdom lightly in that characteristic English self-effacing manner, which is barely enough to hide the spare brain that he must be carrying around with him. His court, apart from the requisite foil played by Alan Davies, is an ever-changing lineup of comedians and bon raconteurs, who in each episode are asked seemingly innocuous questions like “How many wives did Henry VIII have?” Or “How many senses do humans possess?”. The answer is never the obvious though, and contestants get penalised for predictable replies.
This is because the premise of the quiz is to challenge received wisdom, surely one of the top ten British favourite past times, up there with DIY on Bank Holidays, complaining about the weather, covering any available surface in carpet, eating sausages for breakfast, and binge drinking. Fiercely individual and permanently suspicious of authority, there are few things a Brit relishes more than poking holes in assumed knowledge. It is surely no coincidence that many of the nation’s most prominent philosophers belong to the empirical school of thought - John Locke or David Hume spring to mind - or were professional cynics - such as Thomas Hobbes. This inborn scepticism calls for a constant stream of observable data with which to prop up hypothesis, and which leads, I believe, to that other archetype - the collector, obsessively jotting down notes while wrapped in his anorak, or painstakingly assembling yet another model railway. It’s a nation of geeks, enthusiastic collectors of facts whose empirical predisposition makes them wary of intellectuals and of Gauloise-smoking philosophers carelessly throwing around non-quantifiable concepts like “existential nausea” or celebrating the metaphorical death of the author. You are not going to get any postmodern malaise or the demise of grand narratives on QI. Instead you will find a troupe of enthusiastic fact-gathers indulging in some verbal sparring, the inevitable word-play and much much quibbling.
