Q1
Why might the best-known piano work of Erik Satie make you think of Mike Leigh, William Burroughs and Jamie Oliver?
CLUES
- Satie was famous for giving his piano works obscure titles whose relevance is not immediately obvious
- Thinking of Jamie Oliver’s long-standing nickname will help you
Q2
Add Hester’s letter to transform: a place in Ohio into a place in Florida; an ancient Greek medic into a mineral ore of lead; and William Blake’s mythical rebel hero into a killer whale.
CLUES
- This is a familiar type of Round Britain Quiz word-transformation puzzle.
- Hester is a fictional early settler in North America.
A1
The link is nakedness.
Satie’s best known work is probably the trio of short pieces called Trois gymnopédies (1888), which take their title from an annual festival held in ancient Sparta. The Greek word gumnos means naked, as in derived words such as gymnasium (originally a place where people exercised naked), gymnosperm (a seed without an outer protective coating), etc.
The films of Mike Leigh (b.1943) are noted for their bleak realism and black humour, and include the acclaimed 1993 movie Naked. It stars David Thewlis as a young man out of control, and is set largely in Leigh’s native Manchester.
The Naked Lunch (1959) is perhaps the best known book of William S. Burroughs (1914–97), and typical of his work in combining grotesque elements of drug abuse and unconventional sex.
Jamie Oliver is known as the Naked Chef.
A2
Hester Prynne’s letter in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter was the letter A (for Adulteress). By adding A to all of the first named, we arrive at the second.
A place in Ohio (Dayton) becomes a place in Florida (Daytona).
An ancient Greek medic (Galen, Claudius Galenus c. ad 130–201, physician to Roman emperors and a pioneering researcher into the workings of the human organs) becomes an ore of lead (Galena, the mineral form of lead sulphide).
Blake’s mythical rebel hero in his series of complex allegorical ‘prophetic books’ beginning with Visions of the Daughters of Albion, is Orc – who becomes Orca, a killer whale, by adding an A.
Q3
An alien-hunter who was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed; an Updike hero with an infinitesimal name; and a woman who hires Marvin to get rid of Marvin. Could they safely be left in a room together?
CLUES
- ‘Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed’ is a reference to the alien-hunter’s name, rather than being a literal description.
- The Updike hero recurs in several of his books.
Q4
What’s so tragic about the creator of the Jumblies, the first book in Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy, the bobby of Lochdubh and the game of Reversi?
CLUES
- The clues point to relatively modern things but the connection between them goes back four centuries.
- Reversi is known by another name in its commercial form.
A3
Probably not. These are fictional characters whose names are animals.
As Fox Mulder, David Duchovny hunted aliens with his partner Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) for the FBI in The X-Files, the science fiction TV series created by Chris Carter, which ran from 1993 to 2002, and returned in 2016 to 2018.
Harold C. ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is the American everyman-hero in four celebrated novels by John Updike, Rabbit Run (1961), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), Rabbit at Rest (1990). A novella, Rabbit Remembered, also appeared in 2001. An Angstrom (named after a nineteenth-century Swedish physicist) is a unit of measurement equal to a hundred millionth of a centimetre – a surname chosen by Updike to suggest Rabbit’s insignificance.
Cat Ballou is a 1965 comedy-western film which tells the story of a woman (Jane Fonda) who hires a famous gunman (Lee Marvin) to avenge her father’s murder, but finds that the man she hires isn’t what she expected. Lee Marvin won an Oscar for his dual role as both the gunman and the killer he’s being paid to track down.
A4
What’s tragic about them is that they share the names of the eponymous protagonists of Shakespeare’s four main tragedies: respectively, Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello.
The Jumblies were the invention of the artist and nonsense poet, Edward Lear (1812–88).
The first book in William Faulkner’s ‘Snopes trilogy’ is The Hamlet (1940). The Snopes family recur in The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959). Snopes family members also appear in earlier works Sartoris (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930) and The Unvanquished (1938).
In the detective stories of Scots-born journalist and novelist M. C. Beaton (penname of Marion Gibbons), the policeman in the Highland village of Lochdubh is Hamish Macbeth. In the 1990s BBC TV adaptations he was played by Robert Carlyle.
Reversi, a game of strategy for two players involving black and white discs, was invented in the 1880s, but known more recently, commercially at least, as Othello. The Oxford History of Board Games notes: ‘Othello differs from Reversi only in requiring the first two pieces of each colour to be placed diagonally to one another on the four central squares, whereas Reversi merely requires the first four to be played to the centre.’
Q5
Why would an assassinated African dictator, the Prince of Wails and the children’s favourite historian make Julie Andrews burst into song?
CLUES
- There are quite a few assassinated African dictators; this assassination took place in 1990.
- In arriving at the connection it might help you to consult your notes.
Q6
Can you take us, in a flash, from a man who shot 26 famous seconds of film footage to a Central American revolutionary and a musical mother of invention, similarly moustachioed?
CLUES
- The revolutionary’s moustache was so distinctive that the style has become known by his name.
- The musical mother, just to be deliberately confusing, is a man.
A5
Because the first three notes just happen to be: DO-RE-MI.
Samuel K. Doe, the leader of Liberia throughout the 1980s, proclaimed himself head of state after a coup, and gained some sort of legitimacy when he narrowly won a presidential election in 1985. After a decade in which his human rights record was hardly exemplary, he was deposed and killed by rebel forces in September 1990.
The ‘Prince of Wails’ was the nickname of the 1950s singer Johnny Ray, whose principal onstage gimmick was to shed real tears while singing hammy ballads, to the immense irritation of his critics. His hit songs included ‘Cry’, ‘The Little White Cloud that Cried’, ‘Such a Night’, and ‘Yes Tonight Josephine’. Another of his gimmicks was that he wore a hearing-aid, though that was because of a genuine hearing disability.
The English historian Arthur Mee (1875–1943) wrote what is probably still the best-known children’s encyclopaedia, published in 1910 as The Children’s Encyclopaedia and in 1912 as The Book of Knowledge. His other works included The King’s England, a multi-volume work devoted to the counties and landmarks of England; The Children’s Shakespeare (1926); and an encyclopaedia entitled I See All, consisting entirely of pictures (1928–30).
Julie Andrews, in the part of Maria, was famously spurred into song by the phrase ‘Do-Re-Mi’ in the 1965 film version of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music.
A6
Zap!
The 26-second 8-mm amateur film of the shooting of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on 22 November 1963 is called the Zapruder Film, after the local dressmaker Abraham Zapruder who took it with his home movie camera from his vantage point on a concrete pedestal on Elm Street. In common with almost everything to do with the Kennedy assassination, its authenticity has been repeatedly questioned, one of the many points of controversy homing in on the possible alteration or falsification of the 313th of the film’s 486 frames.
The revolutionary is Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919), icon of the Mexican revolution and ally of Pancho Villa.
The Mothers of Invention was the experimental rock group conceived and led by Frank Zappa (1940–93), whose trademark moustache bore a close resemblance to that of Zapata. The Mothers of Invention’s recordings include Freak Out! (1966), Uncle Meat (1968) and We’re Only in It for the Money (1969).
Q7
Why have we printed these pictures in this precise order?
CLUES
- You can always count on Round Britain Quiz to baffle you.
- It’s not so much the name of the character in the second picture, as the name of the film from which it’s taken, that will help you.
Q8
What deceitful claim to fame is shared by Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright; Dr Robert Wilson; and Manuel Elizalde?
CLUES
- All of these deceits took place in the twentieth century.
- The incident in which Dr Robert Wilson was involved happened in Scotland.
A7
The pictures suggest the sequence, in ascending order, 999, 1000, 1001.
Dixon of Dock Green, of course, was the archetypal police TV series – to call Sgt Dixon (Jack Warner) you would have to dial 999.
The photo depicts Geneviève Bujold in the 1969 film dramatization of the life and death of Anne Boleyn, Anne of the Thousand Days. Richard Burton played Henry VIII.
The third picture is an illustration of Scheherazade, the heroine of the 1001 Nights. Scheherazade, the wife of Sultan Shariar, hoped to save her own life by keeping him amused with her serial stories night after night, thus distracting him from his notorious habit of having his wives executed after one night’s passion.
A8
They were all the perpetrators of famous photographic hoaxes.
Two children, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, claimed in 1917 to have taken photographs of fairies in a garden at Cottingley in Yorkshire. Despite experts’ solemn testimony that there was no way the pictures could have been fakes, they confessed in their seventies that they’d created the pictures by simply cutting pictures of fairies out of a magazine.
Dr Robert Wilson was the Harley Street gynaecologist who supposedly took the most famous photograph of the Loch Ness Monster, showing a silhouetted head and neck rearing up out of moonlit water, and known as ‘the surgeon’s photograph’. It was revealed many decades later that he’d been put up to it by two friends, and that the ‘monster’ was a toy submarine with a plywood head. They chose to publish the photo under the doctor’s name because of the respectability that gave to their story.
Manuel Elizalde was the cultural minister of the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos, who sold pictures of a supposed ‘stone-age’ tribe called the Tasaday to the National Geographic. They caused a sensation – until other journalists reported finding the self-same tribe wearing T-shirts and trainers when they were later visited without warning. It turned out Elizalde was trying to divert attention from the exploitation of the jungle region by a mining company of which he was a director.
Q9
A savage creature rescued and looked after on an island; the story of a sexually voracious puppeteer; and a sort of Greek Pygmalion. Which group of Conservatives could form the next in the sequence?
CLUES
- You could say this is an everyday Round Britain Quiz question.
- The savage creature is not Caliban.
Q10
To take Caesar’s soothsayer, with malice aforethought, to three places in New England would make a change. Can you explain why?
CLUES
- The phrase ‘malice aforethought’ is a legal term – but it’s also the title of something.
- ‘Three places in New England’ is a title too.
A9
The sequence is that of the days of the week.
The savage on the island is not Caliban, as you’ll have seen from the clue, but the one rescued by Robinson Crusoe and who became his companion, i.e. Friday.
The puppeteer is Mickey Sabbath, hero of Sabbath’s Theater, the acclaimed 1996 novel by the late Philip Roth. Since Roth was Jewish, the Sabbath is Saturday.
The Greek film Never on Sunday (1960) is a variation on Shaw’s Pygmalion; it’s about an American scholar in Greece who meets a prostitute and sets about improving her. It starred Merlina Mercouri and was directed by Jules Dassin, and the title song won an Oscar.
So the group of Tories is the Monday Club, formed in 1961 by right-wingers including Julian Amery and the Marquis of Salisbury. It was so called because its members regularly lunched together on Mondays.
A10
This is about three words/names requiring a single change of letter each time: Ides – Iles – Ives.
The soothsayer in Julius Caesar, Act I Scene ii, famously warns Caesar to ‘Beware the ides of March’ (i.e. 15 March). In the ancient Roman calendar the ‘ides’ are the eighth day after the ‘nones’. The ides of March, May, July and October are on the fifteenth of those months. The ides of all the other months fall on the thirteenth.
Malice Aforethought is a classic 1931 crime novel by Francis Iles (a pseudonym for Anthony Berkeley Cox), about a Devon doctor who poisons his wife. The title refers to an archaic legal term for the premeditation that must be demonstrated in a conviction for murder.
The American modernist composer Charles Ives composed ‘Three Places in New England’ (1904). The second section features two marching bands playing different march melodies, in different tempi, simultaneously.