Research by the British Woodworking Federation helped to inspire a focus on staircases in a recent of the award winning podcast “No Such Thing as a Fish”, a podcast series produced and presented by the “The QI Elves”, researchers from the television series QI.
The premise is that each week the “QI Elves” present their favourite fact that they have discovered that week. Since the launch of the podcast it has attracted close to 1,000,000 subscribers and has previously been named by Apple as the “Best New Podcast” in 2014 and winning the “Internet Award” in the Chortle Awards in 2015 & 2016.
The QI Elves waited til episode 211 to focus on staircases, but unearthed some staircase facts (some based on research by the British Woodworking Federation on regional differences related to staircases) thoroughly deserving of the tag “Quite Interesting”!
John Templar’s book ‘The staircase: studies of hazards, falls and safe designs’ also features heavily – did you know, for example, that minor accidents happen every 63,000 stair uses.
The staircase aficionado’s amongst you probably already know that the record of most stairs climbed on your head whilst balancing another person on your head is 90 (don’t try this at home) and that Jeremy Corbin can climb 4 flights of stairs faster than anyone else in the Labour Party, but the stats and facts don’t stop there.
The bit on staircases starts at around 13 mins in and even if you think staircases are only vaguely interesting it is well worth a listen. The podcast is available on most podcast services, but you can access this edition below