No Such Thing As The News

A deadpan guide to the world’s strangest footnotes

No Such Thing As The News built a large, playful record of the world at its most improbable. Linked to the researchers of BBC Two's QI, the account followed oddball headlines, animal surprises, scientific curiosities and institutional absurdities with a light touch and a strong instinct for the memorable detail.

The QI instinct

The work followed the sensibility advertised in the bio: weird, unusual and interesting news from the team behind BBC Two's QI. It treated the world as a cabinet of facts, where a court case, a fossil, a cow rescue or a translation error could all earn equal attention.

The art of the straight face

The editorial voice was mostly silent, but not neutral. By choosing stories with comic premises and credible origins, the feed created a dry rhythm: fact first, disbelief second, laughter almost by accident.

A time capsule of shareable strangeness

Though the topics have been dormant since 2016, they preserve a distinct moment in online oddity culture. Before every curiosity became instant social feed material, this account assembled a steady digest of the news items people wanted to forward with the note: you have to see this.

What defines the selection

A large archive of the unlikely

The analysed body of work included 1,914 posts, with the main topic alone accounting for 1,879. It was less a side notebook than a large archive of the strange, gathered with the regularity of a newsroom desk.

A British lens on global oddity

The selection moved through UK and international sources, from the BBC, The Guardian and The Telegraph to US, Commonwealth and regional outlets. Its world view was global, but filtered through English-language reporting and a clear British comic sensibility.

Deadpan by design

Most posts carried little or no added commentary. The voice emerged through juxtaposition and headline choice, trusting the story itself to deliver the raised eyebrow.

Wide popular reach

The public response was substantial, with more than one million views across the account. That reach suggests a broad appetite for strange stories that still came attached to credible news sources.

Deep dives

A newsroom for the improbable

The main topic built a comic atlas of the unbelievable. Its strongest signature was not commentary but selection: official institutions, ordinary mishaps and global headlines made strange by one precise detail, from army exams in underwear to public art defeated by phone-walking pedestrians.

Science and natural history gave the oddness a second register. Prehistoric creatures, early ancestors, mysterious space debris and animal phenomena sat beside human absurdity, making the feed feel like a newsroom run by people who valued curiosity as much as punchline.

The topic also had a taste for the lonely, accidental and bureaucratically surreal. A passenger alone on a commercial flight, restaurants accused of using opium seasoning, or a cheese-powered French station all fit the same editorial instinct: the world is already funny if you look at the footnotes.

When the serious press reports the absurd

Episode 3 sharpened the feed’s appetite for cultural confusion. Museum visitors mistaking glasses for art, an Emoji Bible, and translation mishaps in China all pointed to the same fascination: public meaning can slip, mutate and become comedy in a single headline.

It also leaned into the odd authority of serious sources. BBC News, The New York Times and other mainstream outlets gave legitimacy to stories that might otherwise have sounded invented, such as a wartime code machine found on eBay or police called to a false corpse.

Technology appeared as spectacle rather than industry analysis. Eagles trained to intercept drones captured the topic’s preferred version of innovation: not a market trend, but a striking collision between old instinct and new machinery.

Local oddities with global comic timing

Episode 5 found warmth in small human stories. Google praising a grandmother for polite searches sat comfortably beside rural legal eccentricity and local rescue stories, giving the topic a gentler comic texture than pure shock-value weird news.

History and material oddity also mattered. A 2,000-year-old lump of butter in Ireland is exactly the kind of fact that feels designed for a quiz-show mind: concrete, improbable, and memorable after a single reading.

The topic’s global reach remained light-footed. An avocado-driven crime wave in New Zealand, a town for sale on Facebook in Italy, and a Monopoly-money scam all showed the same instinct for stories where economics, law and daily life turn briefly ridiculous.