ANDREW FFRENCH finds talking to the creator of the QI phenomenon, John Lloyd, really quite interesting.

After spending years with some of the funniest men on the planet, including Douglas Adams, Rowan Atkinson and Stephen Fry, it is perhaps not surprising that John Lloyd's banter is extremely advanced.

Mr Lloyd has the kind of glittering CV that many media types can only dream of, with the writer and TV producer working on numerous comedy favourites, including The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Blackadder, Not the Nine O'Clock News and Spitting Image.

The father-of-three from West Hendred, near Didcot, takes time out of his busy schedule to tell The Guide about his latest book, Advanced Banter: The QI Book of Quotations, which he compiled with John Mitchinson, who helped him launch the QI (Quite Interesting) empire.

The QI business used to be run from The QI Club, on the corner of Turl Street in Oxford, but the building has now been sold and the Corner Club established in its place.

As a result, Mr Lloyd, 57, now spends a lot of time rushing to London for meetings about the new series of QI, but Oxfordshire remains his home and he tells me he is quite curious to see how his old HQ has been transformed.

He offers to meet me there for lunch and while I have no doubt the offer is genuine, I get the impression that he will be far too busy to make a date this side of Christmas.

"We loved the diversity of people who came to the QI Club but I have been going up and down to London so much that I haven't had a chance to go there lately," he said.

A graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, Mr Lloyd spent some time studying philosophy, so it’s not surprising he spends as much time philosophising, as he does talking about his new book.

The writer and I get talking about education, and it soon becomes clear that this gathering of ephemera – information that has been abandoned and forgotten but it still quite interesting – has a great deal of potential for getting children, and adults, to take a renewed interest in the world around them.

Good teachers are the ones who tell pupils the interesting stuff first, not just the times tables and the alphabet, Mr Lloyd insists.

He adds: "The QI project started out long before the TV programme and we wanted to change the way most children were taught in schools.

"By the time children are eight or nine they have had their curiosity beaten out of them.

"A book of quotations is not necessarily a dull and ponderous thing, and I hope kids will quote from it. The good teachers will appreciate it and the bad ones will tell the kids to shut up."

The witty one-liners in Advanced Banter have been organised into more than 250 subjects, from ambition to worry, and from artichokes to windows.

As well as the quotations themselves, there is a prologue provided by Stephen Fry. There is also a proverb from Alan Davies, Fry's co-host on the popular QI quiz show on BBC2, which next year is being promoted to BBC1.

Mr Lloyd, who was at Waterstone's in Oxford last night to sign copies of the new book, says he is delighted that the show is being switched to BBC1 after "beating the competition hollow" on BBC2, and hopes Advanced Banter does as well in the long term as its predecessor, The Book of General Ignorance, which is Amazon's third best seller ever.

Five years of learning has taught his QI team how to avoid the dull stuff, and Advanced Banter looks sure to build on the one million sales to date of other QI titles.

Advanced Banter: The QI Book of Quotations by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson is published by Faber, price £14.99