Fry keeps tickling the funny bone

The ninth season of this agreeable panel show started last week. Once you discover it you're hooked for life -- that's how long it will probably run.  

Stephen Fry

ON and on it now rolls. The ninth season of this agreeable British panel show started last week and once you discover it you're hooked for life -- that's how long it will probably run.

This often verbally surreal British quiz series is hosted by polymath Stephen Fry, the ubiquitous actor, novelist, comedian, librettist, thinker and wit. And each week the rotating group of comedians -- tonight includes Bill Bailey, Gyles Brandreth and Sue Perkins -- grapple with the unanswerable.

The questions Fry asks are impossibly difficult. Any "quite interesting" answer may get a point (whether right or wrong) and penalties will be imposed for obvious wrong answers.

Alan Davies (better known as Jonathan Creek) is the more or less permanent guest. He's the rumpled, working-class foil to Fry's public school erudition. His job, according to Fry, is "to rush headlong like a puppy into the wall of ignorance", which he does with wonderful good humour and many slapstick laughs along the way.

But Fry is always the star. No one talks so amusingly on television with such urbanity, erudition and a sly lasciviousness. He can give the most complex of ideas a libidinousness that's often breathtaking. And no one is more adept at turning conversation into comedy with his clever digressions, lateral segues and those quirky monologues that seem to come so suddenly from out of the ether. They're like verbal epiphanies.

Then there is the idiosyncratic actorly diction, which is often gleefully mocked by his panellists.

Tonight's show is the "Hanatomy" lesson where the panel's members discuss heads, hands, hips, hearts and any part of the human body beginning with H. Fry begins by looking at "H" for hands and asks his panellists: "Now, what can I tell about you by looking at your palms?" This is a great group of guests: the sly sexy Perkins especially a delight.

QI

9.35pm, ABC1