What's So Great About Didcot? | QI 

Ronni's monologue on "obscurity" was exquisite

That was utterly brilliant by Ronni. She had to have improvised the whole thing, but she delivered it perfectly.

One of Ronni Ancona's finest moments - a much underrated panellist

This specific video is so british, it asked me to accept usage of biscuits

As a resident of Didcot, here are 2 more QI worthy things: 1) a few years back someone had some fun with the road signs and we ended up having places like Mordor, Gotham, the Emerald City, and any other fictional place you can think of on the signs! 2) a survey was carried out and Didcot was going to be the most ‘Normal’ place in the country. They gathered economic and voting data among other things and Didcot came out on top!!

Ah, good old Didcot! Lived there for 9 years, and I've still just 8 miles away in Wantage (as in Lord Wantage, mentioned in the clip). I'll even be using Didcot station on Sunday on my way to London...

Ronny's obscurity story. Chef's kiss 😍

My only knowledge of Didcot is that it was one of the places David Brent thought of working in after he had finished with Slough.

1:16 So who is going to tell Alan that the song is called "Wear My Hat", not "Where's My Hat"?

'The meaning of liff' is a marvelously entertaining bit of writing. I was pleased with myself having recognized Stephen's reference...I still have my 35-year-old worn, loved, and dog-eared copy.

Ronni's monologue is brilliant, but Phil's bit on Country Life is also fantastic.

Didcot was a tiny village until the railway boom of the mid 19th century. Nearby Abingdon, the county town of Berkshire was too snooty to accept. Station, which was actually a branch line up to Oxford, so the GWR (Great Western Railway) built it at Didcot instead. Now not only is Abingdon no longer the county seat of Berkshire, it’s not even in it, having been moved into Oxfordshire in 1974. Now Abingdon is essentially a suburb of Oxford.

Ronnie @1:24 is amazing. Fluid imagination.

Windfarms are mesmerising - I wonder at the lack of taste of those that despise them.

If dictionaries had more of that salacious word family histories stuff, I'd never put them down!

I used to live in a village, not far from Didcot, called Kingston Bagpuize, which also features in the Meaning of Liff, defined as “A sixteen-stone man trying to commit suicide by jogging”. Later in life, I was working for a company that decided to move to a place called Frimley, which is also in the book, defined as “The carefree saunter adopted by Norman Wisdom, immediately before disappearing down an open manhole”. The company folded 15 months after the move.

Hooray for "The Meaning of Liff"! That book changed my life.

I love Didcot ❤ I went there back in the good old days of when I did my motorsport course at MK College Bletchley campus 2010-2012 ❤

Is this why the power station was referred to as Didcot Cathedral?

I suspect this was selected really to highlight Ronni's rant about obscurity.

Where can I see more of her? I don't even know Ronni's last name! If that's just her improv, she's incredible!

0:46 Phil: The fuck have I gotten myself into

Phil's posh pricks impersonation👌🏻😅

Fun fact: Nobody has ever seen Ronni Ancona and Johnny Vegas in the same place at the same time.

As a member of the Magdalen College School Air Cadet Force, I once flew over Didcot power station in a Chipmunk trainer. It would have been about 1979, and my pilot at the time let me fly the aero plane in a shallow dive over the power station in a pretend bombing run. Needless to say, that at the age of 15 years, I missed by a mile!

is there a best of for Ronni? there should be there are a few episodes she has some awesome moments

Poor Didcot - by time the trains to Paddington get there, they’re already full with people from Oxford

Ronni Ancona is awesome.

I wonder if Ancona was the lead writer of those jokes about language (e.g. Irish Jockey with Mack, English Class with the gang, Sign language interpreter with Mack, etc.) in Season 1 of The Sketch Show? Later seasons (without Ancona) lacked those types of sketches. I think that's the case anyway after rewatching those shows.

Our friend's "eye / I" joke got thoroughly destroyed in the first few moments of this clip :')

In Queensland! An abandoned railway station, defunct line, sorry can't post my photo

No "hanging chads" at that wedding. lol

"if i find out youve been intercepting my mail -"

Ah Didcot, the armpit of Oxfordshire. Growing up in a village near there I saw it transform from a dump into a dump with a shopping centre

Being from Abingdon myself I have many a memory of trips to Didcot sometimes to go to the cinema but more often to the sainsburys to do the weekly shop and on occasion drop off/pick up my mum who worked there for a time. Always the bridesmaid couldn't sum up a place better than Didcot. It's got frighteningly little going for it. It's only real use was in preventing me from losing my bearings on dog walks as you could always orientate yourself with the power station bc yoh could see the eye sore for miles.

Those cooling towers are long gone.

“And you thought, possibly for comic effect but if so disastrously, that’s not what was happening at all. It was completely something else entirely. It was one of those laughable misunderstandings and I use the word laughable quite wrongly”.

This is my favorite QI clip

Didcot is one of the localities offered with Railworks the train simulator software

Don't knock the place u try living in a town with no shops and no rail station, l lived there in the sixties good times, good mates and a good railway job.

Fun fact - the claimed collapse at Didcot power station which resulted in three workers being trapped and killed wasn't a collapse at all, me and my ex lived close at the time, right near ladygrove lake, in sight of the station and we heard an explosion, no way was it a collapse, but for what I assume are liability reasons the lie was spun that it was a collapse, coincidentally enough occurring just before they demolished it with explosives and the three people who died were working on the demolition in some capacity, the site had shut down normal operations at that point,. I would swear to it.

Wow her story was incredible, especially being made up on the spot. Shows she's exceptionally intelligent behind her comedienne façade. That was really clever, at the end she looked kind of exposed and a bit shy, like she'd shown a part of herself she often keeps out of public view, which made it even more endearing. And then Alan just launched into his theory without even pausing to acknowledge what she'd just said....went right over his head...🤣

That monologue ... Hot damn ...

Ronni would be the pent-ultimate player at the Game of 'give me the first sentence, and I'll weave a story from it."

This was very close to having double allusions to ABOFAL with Stephen in the verbose overexplaining mode he so often employed there and the misremembered* Phil Collins song reminding me of Hugh Lauries cause of death, "Where is the Lid?". * Apparently it is called "Wear my Hat" which makes him wearing a hat rather apropos.

The halcyon days of QI.....

The trivia about the ticket punch confetti and its use at a royal wedding only has a single "source" on the internet. Methinks it's apocryphal.

Ronni is a doll

Too late! Hahaha! That was funny.

I love how you can feel the out of touch poshness oozing out of him when he talks about windframs being ugly.

There was a lot more japery than normal packed into this clip.

Rory had a rough time.

That explains why the Williams F1 team stopped winning after moving to Didcot. Something in the water.

Where is Didcot.. What county?

Phil & Alan slagging off Phil Collins. He's been around longer & made more money than they ever will.

Phil Jupitus, one of the funniest , cleverest comedians, totally under appreciated and underrated, worth a thousand of your Nish Kumars and Romesh Ranganathans, Why so little exposure on TV is beyond me.

Alan is wrong, the song by PC is called "Wear My Hat". It is rubbish though lol.

The theory is..

Nothing good ever happened at Didcot Parkway I can tell you that . . . . .

Women don't want Didcot's on their wedding day though the word does sound very similar.

''Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? First: `A’. How would you define `a’?..... 'Good. So we’re well on the way, then. `a’; impersonal pronoun; doesn’t really mean anything.” Right! Next: `A’… `A-B’. ''

first

this used to be funny

I don't mind the occasional dud answer on comedy quiz shows. Even the best in the business can't split sides every time they open their mouths. But I'm moved to cringe by how Ronni doesn't even appear to know how tedious her answers are. Listen how the others pipe up, trying to save the ship, and she obliviously talks over them. Like ok I get it. She made a punny interpretation of the question and pretended the book title referred to anthropomorphized words. I concede it's clever enough to warrant maybe a quick one-liner, but I don't know why she thought it had the gas to get through an entire children's book. They keep bringing her back on, so I assume not everyone does what I do and skips past her answers if I can tell she's settling in for story time.

Phil Jupitus is fairly funny: or should I be replacing that adverb with a present participle?? 🌹😆🌹