The team from No Such Thing as the News are back with a second helping of  fascinating facts and off-beat news items, switching from their previous Friday night slot to Wednesday evening.

Dan Schreiber is joined by James Harkin, Anna Ptaszynski and Andrew Hunter-Murray, the four presenters of the QI podcast No Such Thing as a Fish, which  spawned the BBC Two programme known as NSTATN for short.

Filmed in front of a live audience at Up the Creek Comedy Club in Greenwich, this  newcomer to the popular QI stable of programmes was given a trial run of five weeks in May and June, and is now back for an eight-week run.

The format is essentially the same, but the script seemed tighter this time round, and overall this week’s opener had a bit more polish than the cheap-and-cheerful pilot series, which was put together on a shoestring budget and, if the rough-and-ready style was anything to go by, in a bit of a rush.

Given that the programme was commissioned by BBC News, rather than as a comedy series, the presenters are not so much “trivia buffs” as commentators on a weird and wonderful world of news, where truth is stranger than fiction.

Rather than simply serving up a smorgasbord of unrelated oddities from the week’s events, there was a shift towards investigating tangential aspects of trending topics such as Donald Trump and scary clowns (those are two separate topics, in case you’re wondering.) We learnt that Trump hates shaking hands with people due to his fear of germs – a fact which seems a little at odds with his usual “hands-on” approach to women.

With Hallowe’en fast approaching, pumpkins were among the points of interest, with record-breakers of the gourd variety including the world’s heaviest pumpkin and the greatest distance travelled by a pumpkin turned into a boat.

There’s been some progress since the first season, when the presenters occasionally held up A4 sheets of paper to illustrate their facts, but there’s still room for more visual aids. The story about Australia’s last remaining flamingo in Adelaide Zoo turning from pink to orange, after a change of diet, was one instance where a picture would have added to the anecdote.

Aired at 11.15pm on Wednesday 12 October 2016 on BBC Two.

Follow Angela Lord on Twitter.

What did you think Season 2’s opener? Let us know below…