Q1
What do you have to move to turn a measurement of the hardness of a substance into the units in which electrical resistance is expressed? And what would you then have to move to make it all stationery?
CLUES
- In Round Britain Quiz, what looks like a spelling mistake often turns out to be deliberate.
- The measurement of hardness and the units of resistance are both named after German scientists.
Q2
What title might Conan Doyle have given to a group portrait featuring a Southern belle, the enemy of the Mysterons and a loyal companion of Robin?
CLUES
- If you’re thinking Batman, you shouldn’t be.
- If, on the other hand, you’re thinking Gerry Anderson’s puppets, that’s helpful.
A1
You have to move the initial letter in each case.
The Mohs scale of mineral hardness was devised in 1812 by the German mineralogist Friedrich Mohs (1773–1839). Based on tests to find ‘what scratches what’, it grades minerals in a randomly ascending scale from talc (1) through gypsum (2), calcite (3), fluorite (4) and so on up to diamond (10). Other substances can be (and have been) assigned Mohs values, so that a fingernail is at 2.5 on the Mohs scale, a copper penny 3 and a pane of reinforced glass about 7.
So, move the M, and you have Ohms, the SI units of measurement of electrical resistance, devised by and named after physicist Georg Ohm (1789–1854). Defined as the proportionality of current and voltage in any resistor (R = V/I), the ohm is represented by the Greek letter omega Ω.
And then by moving the O, you get HMSO, or Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, respected purveyor of pre-gummed Manila envelopes and other such indispensable materials to the civil service and all government institutions. So ‘stationery’ is not a spelling error at all, but very deliberate.
A2
The answer would be A Study in Scarlet – the title Arthur Conan Doyle actually gave to the first full-length Sherlock Holmes novel (published 1888) – because these people are all called Scarlet (or Scarlett).
Scarlett O’Hara, the wilful heroine of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind and of the 1939 film in which she was played by Vivien Leigh.
Captain Scarlet, leader of the futuristic fighter-pilot team ‘Spectrum’ in the Gerry Anderson puppet TV series that bore his name. First shown in September 1967, it was the follow-up to the massively successful Thunderbirds, and gave the world the catchphrase: ‘This is the voice of the Mysterons!’ (The voice was all there was – the alien Mysterons remained resolutely and dangerously invisible throughout the series save for mysterious green circles of light.)
If you’ve got this far you’ll probably realize by now that the ‘companion of Robin’ is not Batman, but Will Scarlet, one of the floating population of ‘merrie men’ present in even the earliest versions of the Robin Hood legend. Sometimes his name is rendered as ‘Scarlock’, suggesting the colour of his clothing may be a later fabrication based on a misreading of his name.
Q3
What simple subtraction would cause: a catastrophic breakage to become a milliner; a duel to become a verbal game; lethal violence to result in hilarity?
CLUES
- ‘Simple subtraction’ is a neat alliterative phrase, not used accidentally.
- The subtraction is the same each time.
Q4
William Somerset’s search for a serial killer; Guido Anselmi’s search for inspiration; and George Webber’s search for a beautiful woman: why are they numerically equidistant?
CLUES
- All of these names are fictional characters.
- We’ve given them to you in ascending order.
A3
In each case the letter S has to be removed from the beginning of the first word, to give you the second.
shatter minus s = hatter
swordplay minus s = wordplay
slaughter minus s = laughter
A4
These are well-known films whose titles consist solely of numbers: Seven (or Se7en), 8½ and 10. Just to make it slightly more challenging, they’re identified by the names of their leading characters, rather than the actors who played them.
Morgan Freeman plays the detective William Somerset in Se7en, David Fincher’s 1995 film about two detectives’ desperate hunt for a serial killer who justifies his crimes as absolution for the world’s ignorance of the Seven Deadly Sins. Each killing imitates one of those Sins: an obese man is made to force-feed himself to death in a version of Gluttony, while, on the other hand, a drug dealer is strapped to a bed and slowly starved to death to represent Sloth.
The part of Guido Anselmi is played by Marcello Mastroianni in the 1963 film Otto e Mezzo (or 8½, as it’s usually rendered in English). Anselmi, a film director not unlike Federico Fellini, attempts to dream his way out of the director’s block he is experiencing while working on his new film, a curious mix of science fiction and autobiography. The title came from the number of films Fellini reckoned he had made to that date (seven features and three shorts).
Dudley Moore played George Webber in Blake Edwards’s 10, a hit film of 1979. It’s the story of a songwriter’s pursuit of a mysterious woman who scores a perfect 10 in his personal ranking system. The ‘perfect’ woman in question was played by Bo Derek.
Q5
If I swim back to a Nevada city, where I play a board game and I learn where to go dancing, what language do I speak?
CLUES
- This question wouldn’t work if we said ‘you’ rather than ‘I’.
- The Nevada city is not the state capital, and it’s not the state’s largest city, but it is famous.
Q6
These three all had a no. 1 hit in 1958. What was it called?
CLUES
- The hit you’re looking for is a rock ’n’ roll classic, but it’s not by Elvis.
- The rugby league player is the all-time record English try scorer.
A5
Latin.
The Latin verb for ‘I swim back’ is Reno – giving us the gambling city in Nevada; the Latin for ‘I play’ is Ludo – a board game; and the Latin for ‘I learn’ is Disco.
A6
If you put the three names together you’ll realize their hit was called ‘Great Balls of Fire’, because they are Peter the Great, Ed Balls and Martin Offiah.
The picture is of the Bronze Horseman statue in Senate Square in St Petersburg, depicting Peter the Great, completed in 1782. It’s the work of the French sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet, and legend has it that, as long as the statue stands, the city of St Petersburg can never fall.
Before becoming arguably even more famous as a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing in 2016, Ed Balls (b.1967) was the MP for the Yorkshire constituency of Morley and Outwood (and before that for Normanton), and served in the cabinets of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from 2006 to 2010.
Martin Offiah was the extremely quick rugby league wing – inevitably nicknamed ‘Chariots’. Perhaps his most impressive achievement was beating the Widnes club record for most tries in a season in his debut year of 1987–8.
‘Great Balls of Fire’ by the flamboyant Jerry Lee Lewis (b.1935) was recorded and released in 1957 and reached the top of the British charts in January 1958. It was the biggest of a short string of hits on Sun Records which also included ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ and ‘Breathless’. His popularity suffered a blow from which it never recovered when he married Myra Brown, his 13-year-old first cousin once removed, in 1958.
Q7
If you subtract an Agatha Christie sleuth and a musical based on H. G. Wells from a Lancashire folk group, how much are you left with?
CLUES
- All three of these things represent pretty good value.
- It may all make more sense if your memory extends back before 15 February 1971.
Q8
Can you explain why a family of medieval correspondents in Norfolk, a professor of Chemistry at the Sorbonne and a writer who declined the Nobel Prize for Literature are all rooted in history?
CLUES
- We might have said they all originate from ‘another country’.
- Millions are alive today thanks to the work of this particular professor of Chemistry, and his name is used for a very common process.
A7
Nothing.
Even those too young to remember pre-decimal currency stand a chance of working this out.
The sleuth is Tuppence, of the husband-and-wife crime-solving partnership Tommy and Tuppence Beresford who appear in numerous adventures by Agatha Christie.
The musical, a vehicle for Tommy Steele and based on H. G. Wells’s novel Kipps, is Half a Sixpence.
And the Lancashire folk group, regularly on British TV after winning the talent show New Faces in 1973, was Fivepenny Piece. (The point of their name is that there was no such coin as a fivepenny piece – suggesting they were out-of-the-ordinary and memorable.)
A (notional) fivepenny piece, minus tuppence, minus half a sixpence (which is threepence), leaves you with nothing at all.
A8
They all begin with PAST.
They are: the PASTon family of Norfolk, whose letters describe domestic life in rural England from 1422 to 1509. The Paston letters were sold to Sir John Fenn, a Norfolk antiquary, and first published in 1787 – with further discoveries being made and published over the next century or so.
Louis PASTeur (1822–95), one of the most important figures in the history of modern science, invented the vaccine against rabies. The heating of foodstuffs to destroy harmful bacteria, known as pasteurization, is based on his discoveries. He became professor at the Sorbonne in 1867 and the Institut Pasteur was founded in 1888.
Boris PASTernak (1890–60), poet and translator of Shakespeare, Verlaine and Goethe. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 for his first novel Dr Zhivago, which was banned in the Soviet Union for being anti-Revolutionary. He was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union and was forced to refuse his Nobel Prize, though it was finally accepted on his behalf by his surviving family many years after his death.
Q9
A play about the RAF, a film about a public school and a notoriously indiscreet political diarist would all be bad for you in excessive quantities. Can you explain why?
CLUES
- The political diarist was a Conservative MP but is more famous now as a diarist than as a politician.
- Together they would provide you with a fairly monotonous diet.
Q10
An Old Etonian vagrant favoured one in East Anglia; the unfortunate Mr Westover chose an Irish one before his obsession with a fugitive; while Mr Scherer selected one in his native USA. What is this all about?
CLUES
- Westover and Scherer were the real names of people who became famous under different names.
- So did the Old Etonian, but if we gave you his real name you would know him straightaway.
A9
They provide an unremitting diet of chips.
Chips with Everything, by Arnold Wesker (1962), is a study of class divisions in the RAF during National Service. In the play, conscript Pip Thompson is mocked for his accent and attitudes by his working-class companions Chas, Ginger and Smiler, to whom he retorts, ‘You breed babies and you eat chips with everything.’
Goodbye Mr Chips, the 1939 film of a 1934 novel by James Hilton, starred Robert Donat in his defining role as a kindly public schoolmaster. ‘Mr Chips’ is often used as a shorthand phrase for the kind of schoolteacher who no longer exists – and perhaps never did.
‘Chips’ Channon – Sir Henry Channon, the backbench MP whose notoriously indiscreet diaries covering the period 1918–53 were first published in 1967. His acute observations of prominent political and social figures were shockingly candid for the time. At one point he wrote, ‘What is more dull than a discreet diary? One might as well have a discreet soul.’
A10
These are three famous people who took the names of rivers as pseudonyms.
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair, 1903–50), the Old Etonian who spent some time as a vagrant (his book Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933, dealt with the years before he had regular writing work) took his name from the Orwell, which flows through Ipswich.
Del Shannon, American pop singer of the 1960s, was born Charles Westover in 1934. His biggest hit was ‘Runaway’. He took his own life in 1990. The Shannon is the longest river in Ireland.
The actor Rock Hudson (1925–85) was born Roy Scherer Jr, later Roy Fitzgerald, later still Rock Hudson. The Hudson flows 300 miles from the Adirondack mountains, down through New York state, to New York City.