It barely registers in my memory, but I know that when I heard Diana was dead I’d just come home from a bike ride. When I heard that the twin towers had fallen, I was walking past the technology block outside my high school in Shropshire. And half an hour after I heard the news that Barack Obama had won the race to be the next President of the United States, I was sitting in a Bloomsbury office chatting to John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, the creators of QI. So what do two of the most interesting, interested people in the country have to say about what has to be the biggest story of the decade, if not the third millennium?

John Lloyd gets us started. “The whole of American history has been about slavery – as somebody rather cleverly said, the first 16 American presidents could have owned Obama as a slave. The enormity of it strikes you – the alternative was so grim. It does make you feel a bit depressed about the options we’ve got though. Do you remember how pathetic Tony Blair’s 1997 speech was? I still remember the first line; ‘A new day has dawned… has it not?’

“I think if you’re black, if you’re poor, if you’re gay, all those people waking up in America this morning suddenly feel like they’re not disenfranchised minorities any more. What it really does is it reminds everybody what is brilliant about America, why America was founded in the first place.”

John and John could talk for England (in Mitchinson’s case, as a member of the British American Project, he regularly does). About ten minutes in the discussion momentarily slows long enough for Lloyd to ask whether we’ve started – apparently I should be steering the course of the conversation, but it seems a shame to cut either of them off. I try a basic one, quizzing them on what they’re working on at the moment, and immediately they’re off again.

“We’ve just been rewriting the Book of General Ignorance to coincide with the BBC1 showing. John (Mitchinson) did some research on whether Spaniards lisp or not. It turns out that the only Spanish king who’s recorded as having a lisp was called Pedro the Cruel, and John discovered this guy wasn’t cruel at all. He was a very good king, but his half brother had him murdered and took the throne, and then they started retrospective propaganda to make out that he was a bad guy. Geoffrey Chaucer, in his capacity as a diplomat, met Pedro the Cruel and really liked him and put him in the Canterbury Tales as the glory of Spain. So suddenly you get from Middle English into spying and The Bourne Identity and Chaucer being the James Bond of his day.

“You take this mad name of a king, Pedro the Cruel, and suddenly what happens to your knowledge when you do QI research is that it starts to all interconnect, so you can’t really just do Middle English and leave out, say, physics and biology. Everybody should have the interesting conversations that the elves [QI's researchers] have every day. We’re like little children, and that childlike thing is important, keeping an enthusiasm and an openness – you have to be prepared to look silly. We are all ignorant, that’s the whole point about it.

“They say that the real point about Socrates was not that he ever set himself up as a wise man but actually quite the opposite – he was continually stressing how little he knew, and annoying everybody by pointing that out. That’s why the ignorance thing is important to us, it’s not an affectation, we just don’t know very much about very much.

“The famous story about Socrates is that somebody went to the oracle at Delphi and said ‘Who’s the wisest man in Athens?’ The oracle of course never gave a straight answer but the answer came straight back – ‘Socrates is the wisest man in Athens.’ So they rush back and find Socrates. ‘Why do they say you’re the wisest man in Athens?’ He replies: ‘Because I’m the only person in Athens who knows that I don’t really know anything.’

This seems to sum up the philosophy of QI. Mitchinson expands. “There’s a notion that popular culture is somehow dumbed down and shallow, and there’s this other thing called ‘culture’. I hate the distinction now – what’s the alternative to popular culture? Unpopular culture? It’s the same with fiction – when you talk about literary fiction, they say ‘those are the books that don’t sell’. People get very sniffy about genre and then you think, well, Shakespeare understood genre – name the Shakespeare play that isn’t a genre piece, he either wrote romances, history plays or he wrote tragedies.”

Lloyd turns the tables on me, briefly interrogating me about my studies before getting onto his own education. “Nobody’s ever asked me, ever, to prove that I’ve got a degree, I mean I’ve never ever had to show a certificate. I shouldn’t tell you this, I mean it’s very bad.”

Mitchinson chimes in with his achievements. “I’ve got a law degree, it’s a terrible third, but nobody’s ever asked me what grade I got. What I’m really trying to say is it’s much more useful to be out there meeting people than writing another essay on racism in Conrad.

“The classic thing they say about universities is you get the notes of the professor reproduced in the notes of the students without passing through the mind of either.

Then there’s the obsession with marking and assessment – it means that by definition you have to reproduce a body of knowledge, you’re not rewarded for being original.”

Lloyd jumps in to bring up one of the facts he’s used on QI. “Marking was invented in 1792 in Cambridge, it was a chemistry professor. It was the beginnings of the industrial revolution and they started to pay academics as piecework per student. In the old days you weren’t marked, you were just interviewed to find out if you understood the subject, and if you did you got a degree. Then William Farish came along and thought ‘It’s such a pain talking to students, it takes hours, and you’ve got to work out whether they really understand the stuff, whereas if I just mark them I can process 10 times as many students per hour and I’ll get paid a lot more.’”

Lloyd’s best friend at college was Douglas Adams. “He had this mad idea, he rang up John Cleese and said ‘You’re a hero of mine, can I interview you?’ And Cleese said, ‘yeah, OK’ and from that he got small walk on parts in Monty Python, and I’m sure that’s what made him write Hitchhiker’s [Guide to the Galaxy]. And that’s the wonderful thing about Barack Obama, it’s just fabulous how possible everything in the world is with a little effort.”

So, as Mitchinson and Lloyd say, you can find connections to link anything – whether it’s Geoffrey Chaucer and Jason Bourne or Douglas Adams and Barack Obama. Just leave out the boring bits.