Q1

If you can find the key to the link between Noddy and his companions, the ‘St Custards skool’ dog, an exclusive address on Piccadilly and Artemisia absinthium, you’ll realize there’s an odd one out. Which?

CLUES

- If you’re thinking about Enid Blyton, you need to think again.

- You’ll eventually find your way out of this, even though all these elements make up quite a long sentence.

Q2

Oskar, who wouldn’t grow up, and Tamino, who had a charmed life, could form an unlikely band with the hero of a modern novel that begins in Sicily and ranges across America. Why?

CLUES

- Oskar is in a novel too.

- They could be a ‘band’ in more than one sense.

A1

All four share their names with prisons.

‘Noddy and his companions’ is nothing to do with Enid Blyton but refers to the (equally loveable) Noddy Holder and the rock band Slade.

The ‘St Custards skool’ dog (in the ‘Molesworth’ books by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle) is named Wandsworth, no doubt as a knowing reference to London’s largest prison.

The Albany is an exclusive block of flats next to Burlington House on London’s Piccadilly, whose residents have included Lord Byron, Lord Palmerston, Gladstone, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, Alan Clark and (after the men-only restriction was lifted) Dame Edith Evans. Altogether a less desirable address, Albany prison is a high security facility on the site of Albany Barracks, part of HMP Isle of Wight.

Artemisia absinthium is wormwood, the aromatic plant that’s a traditional ingredient of vermouth and absinthe (as suggested by its taxonomic name). Wormwood Scrubs prison is in London, close to White City.

What distinguishes Slade prison from the other three is that it’s fictional, having been invented by writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (and placed supposedly somewhere near Carlisle) for the TV comedy Porridge.

A2

Because the works in which they appear all have titles featuring musical instruments: a drum, a flute and an accordion.

Oskar Matzerath is the hero of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel, 1959), whose growth is arrested at the time of the Nazi rise to power in Germany and doesn’t begin again until after the war.

Tamino is the romantic hero of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte or The Magic Flute. The flute protects him from many dangers en route to the heart of his beloved.

Annie Proulx’s 1996 novel Accordion Crimes is the story of an accordion, made by a Sicilian, which passes from owner to owner on a strange epic journey across the USA.

Q3

Look at these people – and to ’ell with them all! Why would we say that?

CLUES

- The man in the first picture needs love.

- The third is a stage performer.

Q4

Where there’s the first, there’s brass. Where there’s the second, there’s usually a bird of some description. And a bottle of the third provoked Long John into song. So what’s the fourth?

CLUES

- You might have an advantage with this question if you’re a Scot.

- The question has a whiff of salt water about it, quite apart from the mention of Long John.

A3

Because they have names beginning with ‘two ls’.

LL Cool J, originally James T. Smith (b.1968), who took his stage name (short for Ladies Love Cool James) when he was 16. His hits include ‘I Need Love’ and ‘Ain’t Nobody’.

Tennis star Lleyton Hewitt (b.1981), 2001 US Open and 2002 Wimbledon singles champion.

The English music hall singer Marie Lloyd (1870–1922), real name Alice Matilda Victoria Wood. At the peak of her success in the 1890s, she became known for her cheeky performances of songs such as ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’, and ‘Oh Mr Porter What Shall I Do?’.

A4

These are islands off the west coast of Scotland, just south of Skye, often known collectively as the Small Isles. They appear here in rough order of distance from the mainland, so the fourth is Canna.

Where there’s Muck there’s brass.

The bird would have laid an Eigg.

Long John Silver’s refrain in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island was ‘Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest/Yo ho ho and a bottle of Rhum’.

The next island, the furthest out in the group, is Canna.

Q5

What fate was shared by: a vivid recreation of a revolution, a treatise on natural selection, a novel about Ireland published in France and verses which were not poetry? And which is the odd one out?

CLUES

- Identifying the titles here may not be enough.

- If you can get the link here you’re really on fire.

Q6

A female character in the movies who wasn’t played by Julie Andrews or Natalie Wood, but had the same name, was a precursor of Klaatu’s companion and a fussy interpreter. Who – or perhaps what – are they?

CLUES

- You could say we’re being a little inhuman by giving you this question.

- We’re in the realm of science fiction.

A5

This is about books that have been burned.

The original handwritten manuscript of Carlyle’s The French Revolution, vol.1, was accidentally used by a housemaid to light a fire while on loan to John Stuart Mill. Carlyle rewrote it all from memory.

Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (full title On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and the Preservation of Favoured races in the Struggle for Life), published 1859, was publicly burned by Christians in the Deep South of the USA as a reaction against attempts to teach Darwin’s theories in schools during the early twentieth century.

The New York post office authorities burnt the entire shipment of copies of the first English edition of Ulysses, printed in Paris by Sylvia Beach, in 1922.

Protestors publicly burnt copies of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in anger at what they saw as the blasphemy within. The Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a ‘fatwa’ in February 1989, from which Rushdie was officially protected at some expense to the British taxpayer. It was apparently lifted in 1998.

The odd one out is the Carlyle, which was burned by accident – the others were all burned deliberately.

A6

They are famous robots in science-fiction films.

The mad scientist Rothwang (played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge), in Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis, constructs a robot called Maria who is the alter-ego of a human character of the same name played by Brigitte Helm, and who incites the workers to revolt, with disastrous consequences. This pioneering piece of silent science fiction set in a mammoth industrial system was inspired by Lang’s first sight of the skyline of Manhattan in 1924. The characters played by Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965) and Natalie Wood in West Side Story (1961) are, of course, also named Maria.

Klaatu’s companion in the cult sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) is a robot called Gort. The pair arrive in a silver spaceship in the middle of Washington, DC on a mission to warn the people of Earth to stop nuclear testing before they destroy their own planet. Michael Rennie played Klaatu, and Lock Martin the huge impassive Gort. The score is by Bernard Herrmann and the film was directed by Robert Wise who, coincidentally, later made The Sound of Music.

The interpreter, among the best-known movie robots of all, is C-3PO (See-Threepio), the fussy droid in the Star Wars films, played by Anthony Daniels. His role is to interpret the myriad alien languages the cast encounter in their travels through space.

Q7

What’s the bond between Kylie’s first no. 1 in Australia, a classic comedy set on the English Riviera and an educational institution founded for the betterment of society?

CLUES

- Kylie’s first no. 1 in Australia was not her first no. 1 in the UK.

- You need to think about who created all of these things.

Q8

What do Brian Friel, William Blake’s painting of Albion and Lou Reed have to be so cheerful about?

CLUES

- They are all associated with two-word phrases that have one word in common.

- Brian Friel is a playwright, but what you need is not the title of one of his plays.

A7

The answer would be a marital bond: this is about husband-and-wife creative partnerships.

The song with which Kylie had her first Australian no. 1 (in 1987) was ‘Locomotion’, originally recorded by Little Eva Boyd in 1962 and written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, who were husband and wife at the time of its composition.

The comedy is Fawlty Towers, written between 1975 and 1979 by John Cleese and Connie Booth, who were also husband and wife at the time of the first series. Connie Booth played the role of Polly. Their marriage broke up in the period between the two series, which partly accounted for the four-year gap between them.

The institution is the LSE (properly the London School of Economics and Political Science), founded in 1895 by the pioneering economists and social reformers, husband and wife Sidney and Beatrice Webb. They had married in 1892. The idea for the LSE was conceived by the Webbs along with George Bernard Shaw and Graham Wallas at a breakfast party in Surrey in the summer of 1894, and funded by a bequest to the Fabian Society from Henry Hunt Hutchinson.

A8

They give us a Field Day, a Glad Day and a ‘Perfect Day’ – so they’re having a pretty good time.

Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea set up the Field Day theatre company in Derry in 1980 to produce Friel’s classic play Translations, about the British forces in Ireland in the nineteenth century and their re-naming of ancient Gaelic places as they mapped the island for their own purposes. Field Day became a significant cultural force in Northern Ireland as a theatre group, publisher and artistic organization.

Glad Day is the name by which Blake’s 1794 image of Albion, naked and raising his arms surrounded by a blaze of light, is often known. It’s also called The Dance of Albion or Albion Rose. The inscription that accompanies the image reads: ‘Albion rose from where he labourd at the Mill with Slaves/ Giving himself for the Nations he danc’d the dance of Eternal Death.’

‘Perfect Day’, a classic song from Lou Reed’s 1972 album Transformer (produced by David Bowie), became an enormous hit when re-recorded by various artists, one line at a time, in aid of Children in Need in 1997, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davis. The performers included Reed himself, Tom Jones, Bono, Bowie, Dr John, Emmylou Harris, Boyzone, Thomas Allen, Lesley Garrett, Joan Armatrading and Elton John.

Q9

Why might a Christogram suggest a group of undercover British intelligence officers in Ireland, the man who wanted the Maltese Falcon back and the star of Dr Zhivago?

CLUES

- A Christogram is a pictorial symbol that represents Christ or Christianity.

- The bit about British officers in Ireland refers to events of a hundred years ago.

Q10

Why would Fantin-Latour be attracted by Lord Wavell’s anthology, the third album by Public Image Ltd and a novel by Virginia Andrews?

CLUES

- Fantin-Latour was a French painter and it would help you to know what he painted.

- Sorry this is such a blooming hard question.

A9

The Christogram is the chi-ro, an early Christian symbol formed from the Greek letters Χ and Ρ, the first two letters of the word ΧΡIΣTOΣ (Christos). It suggests the word Cairo.

The Cairo Gang was a group of British intelligence officers working undercover in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence, gathering information and plotting the assassination of key republican leaders. They were probably so nicknamed because they had a habit of meeting in the Café Cairo on Grafton Street in Dublin. They were rounded up by the IRA in a series of carefully planned dawn raids and executed on 21 November 1920.

Joel Cairo is the scared little man, played by Peter Lorre, who goes to see Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) to ask him to recover the missing black bird, in the classic 1941 John Huston film The Maltese Falcon.

The star of Dr Zhivago (1965) was the Egyptian-born actor, racehorse owner and contract bridge player Omar Sharif (1932–2015), whose nickname early in his movie career was Cairo Fred.

A10

The French painter Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) is best known for his meticulous studies of flowers.

His work became known to a new generation of pop-culture watchers when his piece ‘A Basket of Roses’ was used by graphic designer Peter Savile for the cover image on the New Order album Power, Curruption and Lies (1983). The other references are to works with Flowers in their titles.

Lord Wavell (Field Marshall Archibald Percival Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell, 1883–1950) was the penultimate Viceroy of India, from 1943–47, and also compiled the famous poetry anthology, Other Men’s Flowers, in 1944.

The Flowers of Romance was the third studio album (1981) by Public Image Ltd, the group formed around John Lydon after the break-up of the Sex Pistols.

Flowers In The Attic is a ‘Gothic’ novel by Virginia Andrews, credited as V. C. Andrews, published in 1979, about four children locked up by their pious grandmother in the attic of a house in Virginia for three years. It caused a stir for its treatment of incest between siblings, was banned by many US public libraries and education boards, and has been filmed twice.