BBC Radio 4 Brain of Britain Ultimate Quiz Book. Russell Davies

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      Mr Barlow was stunning – well up to the standards of Ian or Kevin [Ashman]. He described himself as a “former diplomat”. (Ian ascertained from him later that he was involved in the Rhodesia independence negotiations.) Unlike a lot of present day “semi-pro” contestants who appear on all the broadcast quiz shows and who just eat encyclopaedias, Peter Barlow was extremely widely read and genuinely knowledgeable about huge amounts of stuff. For the only time in living memory – or mine, at any rate – he remains the only contestant who scored five-in-a-row in each of his first three rounds. So, at the end of round three, along with a couple of bonuses, he’d scored 20-odd, and the others were on two or three. He would have done it again in the next round, but for the fact that he’d never heard of Elton John. Music question – “What is the connection between this piece of music and Watford Football Club?” I can’t now remember which classic we played, but he’d no idea. Which was just as well as Ian was beginning to panic that we’d run out of questions!

      Incidentally, that can happen – it did once while I was deputising for Robert Robinson, but fortunately a cache of spares was being carried that day in the programme-box.

      When Ian Gillies died, the succession passed naturally to the latest specialist in omniscience, the multi-title winner Kevin Ashman. Bob Robinson was keen to see the “Mycroft” tradition continued with the new question-setter. But after considering the matter – and probably knowing, since he knows so much else, that Bob was a keen reader of Dickens – Ashman suddenly said, one evening at the Paris Theatre in Lower Regent Street, “You know, Bob, our relationship isn’t really Sherlock and Mycroft – it’s much more Spenlow and Jorkins.” In David Copperfield, Spenlow and Jorkins are business partners, but the absent Jorkins’s role is to be referred to by Spenlow as a stickler and nay-sayer. When David asks to be released from an apprenticeship, for example, Spenlow says he wouldn’t object, but that Jorkins would be dead against it. When Robinson had stopped laughing, he agreed that Kevin should be Jorkins ever afterward – and he was, until the day when his celebrity as a contestant/performer took away all his time.

      Since then, the overlord of the question-setting process has been the programme’s producer himself, Paul Bajoria. Questions are gathered in from a handful of setters, and it’s a “floating population”, changing from year to year to keep the style fresh. The roster includes writers who provide questions to the other major quizzes of the day, from University Challenge to Round Britain Quiz. Paul says it’s noticeable that among these experts, “great minds think alike” to the extent that the same question will often emerge from two or more of the contracted contributors – which suggests that the setters do respond to the atmospheres of the world around us, even if they seldom produce the kind of dog-licence question Bernard Hollowood once requested. Sadly the well-known BBC economies have meant that nobody now appears on-stage as a consultant and referee in cases where an answer is half-right – the question-setter David Kenrick was the last to do the job – but now, Paul Bajoria and I have to decide such matters between ourselves, in brief and gnomic conversations down the wire between the podium and the technical booth.

      Everything seems to continue smoothly, though there are occasional controversies over other matters. The last one to provoke journalistic outrage was the triumph of Barry Simmons in 2012. Some observers felt that since Barry had been a television Egghead (the sixth) since 2008, he was no longer the kind of “civilian” that Brain of Britain should be featuring. Paul Bajoria was called upon to defend the programme’s position, and did so eloquently in a BBC blog: “When we saw that Barry Simmons had applied for Brain of Britain 2013,” he wrote,

      we discussed whether he should be allowed to compete, and we realised almost immediately that there’s no sensible reason why not. Barry’s an experienced quiz player who reached the Final of Brain of Britain in 2008 – though, as it happens, he came last. Since then, he has built up his quiz CV to the point where he was invited to apply for, and won, a place on the resident team on BBC2’s Eggheads quiz. Many of his fellow Eggheads are former Brain of Britain or Mastermind champions, or both. Small wonder that, after the requisite five-year gap, Barry was determined to go for the prize! When we offered him a place, we had a conversation to ensure that he realised a poor performance in the programme might harm his reputation. Barry was happy to take the risk, which is a mark of the man. Brain of Britain is no walkover: you get, on average, about twelve utterly unpredictable questions of your own, plus a chance to score bonuses on other people’s if your trigger finger is quick enough. As soon as you get one wrong, your turn ends. Many an accomplished quizzer has crashed and burned.

      Barry is still a welcome visitor – in fact he was present for the wine and nibbles after this year’s Final, at the BBC Radio Theatre in April 2017. The Theatre is certainly our most elegant home, but we have others – at BBC Maida Vale, in the studio where Bing Crosby made his last recording, and in Salford, where the programme team is now headquartered.

      So how do you become a Brain of Britain? Can it be done simply by memorising things, list by list, from works of reference – I don’t think so. Yes, there are certainly things everyone mugs up on: Kings and Queens of England (and elsewhere), the Periodic Table perhaps, the night sky, the works of some obviously great writers. But there is also a quizzing temperament, and my theory is that it has less to do with remembering things than with being unable to forget anything. It’s almost more like an affliction than a talent – anything that presents itself as a FACT is grabbed by the brain and not allowed to escape. If you’re a sufferer from a cranial overcrowding of that kind, you should probably be having a go at this quiz lark. Remember, there is no more majestic title to aim for than Brain of Britain, and you receive it engraved, as it should be, on a silver salver.

      Brain of Britain: A Note on the Questions

      Most of the questions in this book are drawn from Brain of Britain contests broadcast during the last ten years. There are always questions left over from every contest, and although most of those are recycled, it may be that a few here were never actually broadcast. A few more have been added for topicality’s sake, or because, having popped up, they seemed too good to leave out.

      Clearly whole classes of question which we can use in the radio programme don’t suit the printed page at all – “How do you spell eczema?”, for example, falls a bit flat. We have also had to say goodbye to music questions where the sound of the music itself is vital to the search for an answer, and to questions which follow on deliberately from the answer to the previous question (thus giving it away).

      From the remaining huge pile of possibilities, it’s actually not hard for a question-master (as we used to be called) to choose the good stuff. By its very nature Brain of Britain tends to eschew the kind of question which can easily be answered by that breed of quiz player (and there are such people) who spends large amounts of leisure time rote-learning reference books. We’ve never been very interested in robotic answers about capital cities, the colours on a particular country’s flag, or the world champion in a particular sport in a particular year. One actually looks forward to asking a good question, for the pleasure either of hearing the correct answer given, or of revealing the answer because it is useful, surprising, entertaining, or downright odd. Some of the answers here, you’ll quickly notice, are a lot longer than the questions – which is as it should be. There would be nothing more frustrating than giving an answer which merely left the reader (or listener) thinking, “I wonder what the story behind that is…?”

      RD

MILD

      The first ten quizzes are entry-level and are designed to warm up your grey cells before you tackle the steeper slopes!

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