Dan Schreiber’s Impossible Things is informative and fun in equal measure – perfect for inspiring young investigators of the weird and wonderful
When you’ve been a QI elf for as long as Dan Schreiber, you have a head full of fascinating facts, strange nuggets and unsolved mysteries just waiting for brilliant investigators to dig deeper. Impossible Things is a distillation of some of this treasure, perfectly pitched to engage super-curious young minds.
When Schreiber started scoping the book, he knew there was vital ground to cover. “I wanted to go for the biggies: ghosts and UFOs and cryptids – Big Foot, and so on,” he says. “And then it was thinking, what are the conversations I loved having as a kid?” Time travel was one obvious one, so too were the bizarre happenings. “Experiences that people have where often other people will say, ‘oh grow up, stop thinking about that’.” If Impossible Things can be distilled down, it’s a call out to young readers to keep the ungrown-up thinking going.
Becoming an ‘Impossible Investigator’ requires an open mind and the right tools – and that’s where the Yogibogeybook comes in. The name was inspired by the Yogi Bogey Box Schreiber read about in James Joyce’s Ulysses (there, it’s a box of kit used by ghost hunters). He loved the name so much he repurposed it – so the Yogibogeybook is the place where strange findings and offbeat investigations can be noted down.
“It’s a very Fortean idea logging these things,” he says. “The reason I’m really happy with that conceit is that it allowed me not to encourage an absolute belief in absolute facts about ghosts or UFOs, but to say: ‘we don’t know, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important to write it down’. It’s a good way of not dismissing – a middle ground to say that you’re allowed to be curious about this, you’re allowed to be interested.”
Chapters start with an adventure he has been on or a mystery that has intrigued him. Notably, this includes a story about a ghostly glass levitation the young Dan Schreiber and family experienced in a Tibetan hotel. He says he’s not what you’d call a ghost believer, but then again… “It’s what I call the soft rock, the impossible thing that has happened to you that you can’t explain.”
There were other strange childhood happenings, not recounted in the book, that prepared the young Dan Schreiber for tuning into the weirder aspects of life. Growing up in Hong Kong, there was a regular babysitter who would tell tales of epic proportions. She claimed to have a stick that could stop tornados and typhoons and said she had been kidnapped by aliens as a child. “Not one told us it wasn’t true,” he says.
But the open-minded approach served him well. Thanks to what he calls “so many random relevant coincidences”, when Schreiber arrived in the UK, aged 19, to stay with his aunt in Oxford for three weeks he had the career opening of a lifetime. His aunt had shown one John Lloyd round BBC Radio Oxford (she was only co-opted at the last minute because her boss had gone out on a lunch). She worked on local programmes at the time and had no real idea who John Lloyd was. In passing, she told him her nephew heading over from Australia was looking to break into comedy, then asked if he had any tips. Lloyd passed on his phone number.
“It’s a very Fortean idea logging these things – a middle ground to say that you’re allowed to be curious about this, you’re allowed to be interested”
There was an extraordinary run of coincidences when Lloyd and Schreiber met that sealed his destiny as a QI elf. Schreiber had just finished at a Rudolph Steiner school in Sydney and Lloyd was thinking of sending his son to a Steiner school so wanted to know all about the teaching approach. Schreiber had been living in the very suburb of Palmy (Palm Beach, Sydney) where Lloyd had collaborated with Douglas Adams on The Meaning of Liff. Schreiber happened to have this same book in his bag because it was his favourite read – he’d brought it along for Lloyd to sign.
“And then the last thing was, he said, ‘so what do you want to do in life?’. I said: ‘I grew up in Hong Kong and I speak Mandarin. I want to move over to China and be a stand-up comedian in Mandarin’. He almost fell off his chair because he’d literally just come from a meeting where he was talking about pitching a show looking at Chinese stand-up and he was trying to find a Westerner who spoke Mandarin well enough to present the show over there. He said: ‘Well, clearly the universe has said we should work together’. That’s not how he does general QI hires, by the way. It’s a rigorous process of seeing if you know facts and all that stuff.”
Dan Schreiber has been involved in successful fact-sharing shows ever since. Alongside QI, there’s No Such Thing as a Fish – now in its tenth year and on tour in the UK before a sell-out date at Sydney Opera House in November. More recently, there’s We Can Be Weirdos, exploring the wilder beliefs of notables who have influenced the course of human history.
There is also the Radio 4 radio show The Museum of Curiosity. The latter was a welcome coincidence. On the day John Lloyd went into Radio Oxford and met Dan Schreiber’s aunt, he was actually pitching QI as a radio show. That never happened – it was destined for TV. Eight years on, Lloyd and Schreiber went back in and – with Richard Turner at the BBC – finally brought what they consider to be its rightful heir, The Museum of Curiosity, to the airwaves.
Coincidences get a look in in Impossible Things – within a chapter called Are we all actually living in a giant video simulation? These and other crazy-but-fascinating trains of thought are perfect open-ended debates to stimulate discussion and investigation. As Dan Schreiber sees it, these ‘what ifs’ are the ideas we need around the dinner table. “It’s a much better conversation than something boring about a bill that’s come in. It just reminds you, ‘isn’t it good to be alive – it’s exciting’.”
In the epilogue of Impossible Things, there’s a quote from the experimental British actor, writer and producer Ken Campbell. He liked to counsel his young daughter Daisy never to believe in something, but rather to suppose that something could exist. “Suppose is a much better way of approaching things,” says Schreiber. “That’s what the book is – it’s how to be a supposer”.
Impossible Things, by Dan Schreiber, illustrated by Kristyna Baczynski, is published by Hachette Children’s Group, £12.99
Further reading: Robot Stories – Simon Packham’s timely tale about tackling anxiety
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