As the wildly popular podcaster of Everything Under the Sun,
Molly Oldfield is on a mission to help children find answers to questions big and small
How do frogs jump, why do pandas love bamboo, and why do we work to make money? These and other burning questions are answered in Molly Oldfield’s latest book Everything Under the Sun: All Around the World. There are 366 queries answered, one for every day of a leap year, and with insights from top experts in their field as well as star names.
These are genuine questions, and what makes the book rather special is the fact that they come from children from all corners of the world. Molly Oldfield, as factfinder extraordinaire, fields hundreds every year for her weekly podcast Everything Under the Sun. She takes this role extremely seriously and every day wakes up to fresh voice messages from young people. “I love hearing their voices coming from all over the world – I’m in Uruguay, I’m in New Zealand,” she says. “It’s such a lovely start to the day.”
Molly Oldfield has a distinguished ‘pedigree’, having been one of the original QI elves. She met John Lloyd – bringer on of so much talent – just as she was finishing at Oxford and got in at the start of both a show and a whole genre, delving for questions and answers throughout the Stephen Fry years.
During that time, she also started writing children’s books. The first was The Secret Museum, and it was a question from a friend’s young daughter who was enjoying the book (‘can blue whales talk to killer whales?’) that led on to an answer, and that led on to the podcast. Molly Oldfield now has a raft of books under her belt and her weekly quiz, with questions set by children, also challenges adult minds in the Guardian.
While most of her time is spent working in her garden-shed office in Oxfordshire, for the past year and a half she has had a complete change of scene, living in Bali so her sons (aged two and five) could experience life at Green School – an amazing jungle setting and immersion into nature. “We just went there for an adventure, pretty much.”
Even in this faraway environment, Molly Oldfield didn’t forget the burning questions waiting for answers. Not only did she host workshops for the Green School’s Year 4s on how to make podcasts and do talks but she also fielded all her usual questions, plus loads from the Green School’s students and children in the neighbourhood.
So, another burning question – are there variations in the things children ask related to location? Yes, there are regional flavours and preoccupations, is her answer, but that’s often down to the things they see and encounter around them. “I found in Bali their questions are even more nature based than they are here because they are so connected to nature – so they ask about plants and trees, and banyan trees.” Indeed, the banyan is considered so sacred in Bali that a whole raft of fascinating questions came in about that one stately tree.
This same regionality is borne out by the messages she gets from around the world – for instance, children in coastal communities tend to focus on oceans and waves. But some things are universal, and Molly Oldfield is well used to the deeply out-there questions that no one adult can provide a satisfying answer to. “Like who invented the world and who is god and who was the first mummy if my mummy had a mummy?” she says.
That said, Everything Under the Sun: All Around the World tackles testing themes head on. The book begins with ‘Where’s the happiest place in the world?’ and ends with ‘What is the meaning of life?’ In between, there are some scientific and cosmic headscratchers, and – as with the podcast – she has called in some distinguished help. For instance, Sophie Dahl talks about how magic is made, William Sieghart ponders who wrote the first ever poem, Grayson Perry discusses why clay gets hard and Marcus du Sautoy tackles, rather deftly, what the biggest number is.
“William Sieghart ponders who wrote the first poem, Grayson Perry discusses why clay gets hard and Marcus du Sautoy tackles what the biggest number is”
Expert and insider voices add weight. Even so, Molly Oldfield has made the sensible decision to issue a gentle disclaimer at the front, explaining how all answers are the knowledge we have right now, and facts can change. Even for this 4-10 age group, she thinks that clarifying statement is important. And, of course, it’s always good to remind children that one day they may uncover the solution no one before them ever spotted. “The more you nurture children’s curiosity and answer their questions, the more they will keep on asking questions,” she says.
She was a deeply curious child. “I was one of those kids who kept on asking questions. I remember getting an edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a child and being so excited – and that so limited the amount of knowledge you could get compared to now.” Her own boys have caught the same curiosity bug and both have a question included in this book. “My two-year-old asked what’s the biggest digger in the world. My five-year-old is really into chess – he plays on this app on my phone ChessKid and there’s this coach on there called FunMasterMike – and so I asked him to answer my son’s question. My son was so delighted he took FunMasterMike’s answer to his school chess club.”
Molly Oldfield believes children have always loved being the one in possession of a really obscure fact, but her podcast has also brought them together, wherever they may live, in a shared information exchange endeavour. “I think one thing the kids really like is hearing other children’s voices on the podcast,” she says. And they also love using their expertise, even if it’s sometimes at the expense of adults in the room. “At Cheltenham Literary Festival I was asked what sound giraffes make and this little kid at the back said, ‘they hum’. And I said, ‘how do you know that?’ and his dad said, ‘because he listens to your podcast.'”
This book has plenty of other nature facts – scatological ones included, of course – also complex ideas that will make even the wisest among us pause. ‘How can you store so many things in your mind, and will you ever run out of space?’ is one. Also, ‘How many ants could you fit in a plane and still take off?’. Then there are life’s true mysteries, such as, ‘Why is vanilla ice cream so yummy?’.
Molly Oldfield is already busy working on the next instalment of the Everything Under the Sun series and it will have more of a bedtime theme. She continues to wake up to those delightful messages from her podcast listeners. And, with such a brilliant band of curious listeners across the world, there’s never going to be a shortage of great questions that need her earnest attention.
* Everything Under the Sun: All Around the World is published by Ladybird Books, £25. Children can submit questions to Molly Oldfield’s podcast and books at mollyoldfield.co.uk
Further reading: Spirit guide – an interview with Danny Robins
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