Following the publication of the salaries paid to its top stars the BBC has rushed to deny reports that QI presenter Sandi Toksvig was being paid substantially less than her equally erudite predecessor Stephen Fry.
“While it is true that in purely financial terms Stephen did receive more, the fact is that since her highly publicised diet there is just so much less of her to pay than there was of Stephen,” pointed out the keeper of the BBC’s magic money tree, Barclay Spank.
“As a result, pound for pound their salaries are almost identical,” he explained adding that while Sandi Toksvig may appear a tad plump, until you have seen Stephen Fry close up it’s impossible to appreciate just how enormous he is.
“It’s not just his intellect that’s huge, you’d need a whole bank holiday weekend just to walk round him,” he said adding that frequent guest panellist Phil Jupitus, is even bigger requiring a minimum of a week for a full traverse.
Fry’s bulk was later confirmed by the programme’s question setters, the QI elves, who explained that they had allocated a full ten points for a correct answer, five for “an Easter weekend”, which would usually include Friday and a deduction of ten points for Christmas, whit week or “a month of Sundays”.
Producer John Lloyd declined to be drawn on the salaries of the two presenters but did confirm that due to health and safety regulations there was no plan to include an experimental demonstration of Toksvig’s crash diet in the coming series “O” as a “Open Ovoids”
However he explained that a full set of instructions will be included in the upcoming edition of “the QI Book of General Ignorance” should viewers wish to try to lose weight quickly themselves in the privacy of their own homes.
Approached by the Herald omnipresent QI panellist Alan Davies declined to comment.
A spokesperson for the Guinness book of records confirmed that was a first and would be featuring in the 2018 edition.
