Q1
Why would you be well advised to avoid the Oscar-winning Mr Lee, an album (and accompanying film) by Harry Nilsson and Sheffield United?
CLUES
- Working out RBQ questions can sometimes be painful.
- Mr Lee is a writer/director, not an actor.
Q2
You could get 8 out of 10 for connecting Hockney’s Percy, Tennessee’s frustrated wife in Mississippi and what Eliot’s street lamp said. How?
CLUES
- You could say this is one of our pet questions.
- We could also mention someone with whom Batman has a love-hate relationship.
A1
Because they all have the names of sharp objects.
The Oscar-winning Mr Lee is Spike Lee, director of acclaimed movies including She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991) and BlacKkKlansman (2018), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
The Nilsson album (dating from 1970) is The Point!, a narrative fable with music about a round-headed boy growing up in a land where everyone and everything else is pointed. An accompanying animated film incorporating the music from the record was originally narrated by Dustin Hoffman, though for contractual reasons it was re-voiced for later releases.
Finally Sheffield United FC are nicknamed the Blades – because of the long history of cutlery manufacture in the city.
A2
They all refer to cats. Originating in a cat-food commercial, the phrase ‘8 out of 10 cats’ has become so familiar in the context of marketing surveys that it has given its title to a TV panel show.
David Hockney painted Mrs and Mrs Clark and Percy in 1970–1, depicting fashion designer Ossie Clark and his wife Celia Birtwell shortly after their marriage. Percy is their cat – although, in fact, the white cat sitting on Ossie’s knee in the picture is not Percy at all, but another of their cats, Blanche.
Tennessee Williams’s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) is about the tensions that rise to the surface at a gathering of the cotton-rich Pollitt family in Mississippi, especially those between Brick and his wife ‘Maggie the Cat’. The role was created on Broadway by Barbara Bel Geddes who, two decades later, played the matriarch in Dallas. The play was filmed in 1958 with Elizabeth Taylor in the role.
In several of T. S. Eliot’s early poems (in the 1917 collection Prufrock and Other Observations), cat-related imagery recurs, for example to represent creeping fog. In the poem ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ the street-lamp says ‘remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter’. Phrases from this and other early poems by Eliot were adapted by Trevor Nunn for the lyrics to the song ‘Memory’ in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats.
Q3
Identify this bunch: a family who kept 3/4 time; one of a trio of fishy publishers; and the author of Mythologiques who might make you think of denim.
CLUES
- Think this through and don’t put your head in the sand.
- You’re looking for a name common to all three.
Q4
Woody Allen in 1972; Bryan Singer in 1995; Ray Bradbury in 2009: what did they all do, and which is the odd one out?
CLUES
- This is about the creative output, rather than the lives, of the people named.
- You must remember this …
A3
They’re all called Strauss, which is the German for ‘bunch’. (It also means an ostrich, often in the compound Vogel-Strauss.)
The Strauss family of Vienna (Johann I, 1804–49, and his sons Johann II, 1825–99, and Josef, 1827–70) were especially known for their waltzes (Johann II was ‘the Waltz king’) which are typified by a time signature of 3/4.
Farrar-Strauss-Giroux is the American publishing house whose logo consists of three stylized fish.
Claude Levi-Strauss (1908–2009) was a Belgian anthropologist and leading structuralist thinker known for his work on kinship, ritual and myth, whose four-volume work Mythologiques, exploring codes of expression in different cultures, appeared between 1964 and 1972. His name may conjure up the jeans manufacturer Levi Strauss & Co., although, of course, he has no connection with it whatsoever.
A4
They used quotations from the movie Casablanca for the titles of their own works. There’s more than one possible answer to the ‘odd one out’ part.
Play It Again, Sam (1972) stars Woody Allen as a man obsessed with Humphrey Bogart and Casablanca in particular. Clips from the film crop up throughout, cleverly giving the impression that Bogart is in dialogue with the cast. Unusually, it wasn’t directed by Woody Allen himself but by Herbert Ross – but it’s so much a Woody Allen picture that it would be misleading not to name him in the question. This could be the odd one out because the title is a (deliberate) misquotation of Ingrid Bergman’s line to Dooley Wilson, ‘Play it, Sam. Play “As Time Goes By”.’
The Usual Suspects, the 1995 noir thriller directed by Bryan Singer, starred Kevin Spacey, Pete Postlethwaite, Gabriel Byrne and Stephen Baldwin. Christopher McQuarrie’s screenplay won an Oscar. It’s famous for its exceptionally complex plot and the twist at the end which reveals that much of what we’ve been watching has been a fabrication. Its title also comes from Casablanca – Claude Rains’s line ‘Round up the usual suspects’ being the final line of the movie.
We’ll Always Have Paris is a late collection (2009) of previously unpublished stories and sketches by Ray Bradbury, the great American writer who died in 2012. He is often described as a science-fiction writer but he protested that his only book in that genre was Fahrenheit 451. His short stories, of which he published some 600 during his lifetime, constitute a remarkable body of work. This could also be the odd one out, being a book title rather than a movie.
Q5
Please hum the following: a Slavonic affirmative, an animated Great Dane’s second name, a request for new candidates and the first scientologist.
CLUES
- Together they make a phrase which you should be able to hum.
- If you can think of more than one animated Great Dane, you’re doing better than us …
Q6
A jester at an English court began a sequence that went on to include a novel chronicler of women’s suffrage, and the woman responsible for the meeting of Anne and Oscar. Who were they? And which French existentialist could be said to have completed the cycle?
CLUES
- For strict accuracy we should pronounce ‘Anne’ in the Dutch way, as two syllables.
- This could be described as a perennial sequence.
A5
The elements give you Da-doo-ron-ron – so you’d hum the Crystals’ 1963 hit song.
A Slavonic affirmative is Da (yes).
The best known (only!?) animated Great Dane would be Scooby Doo, scrape-prone companion of the gang of the Mystery Machine in the Hanna-Barbera cartoons, whose second name, you could (just about) argue, is Doo.
A request for new candidates is R.O.N. – an option on a ballot paper standing for Re-Open Nominations, which indicates that the voter rejects all of the named candidates.
The first scientologist is the science-fiction writer and founder of the Church of Scientology – L. Ron Hubbard (1911–86)
‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ was the eighth single by New York girl-group the Crystals, their second UK hit (their fifth in the US), written by crack hit-making team Phil Spector, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, recorded in March 1963.
A6
It’s about the four seasons.
The court jester is Henry VIII’s jester Will Sommers, said to be the only person at court who could get away with telling the famously volatile king the truth. He survived Henry and remained at court under Queen Mary; he is thought to have died in 1560.
The novelist Howard Spring wrote Fame is the Spur (1940), the story of the rise of socialism in Britain and the battle for women’s suffrage.
The woman who could be said to have arranged a meeting between Anne and Oscar is the actress Shelley Winters (1920–2006), who won an Oscar for her role as Mrs van Daan in the 1959 film version of The Diary of Anne Frank.
And to complete the cycle, the existentialist writer Albert Camus wrote a novel (published in 1956) called La Chute – translated into English, naturally enough, as The Fall.
Q7
Why could you be forgiven for feeling a little claustrophobic in the company of these people?
CLUES
- The man with the telephones is a musician.
- It’s the character, not the actor, we need from the second picture.
Q8
Potassium, nickel and iron are sharp; combining sulphur, gold and sodium produces steam; while dogs are happy with tungsten and silver. Can you explain?
CLUES
- The answers are not to do with compounds or alloys of these elements, as such.
- In RBQ, as in crosswords, mention of a chemical element often calls simply for its symbol.
A7
Because their names all suggest places where you would keep an animal cooped up.
The first picture is Sir William Penn, English Quaker writer and nobleman, the next-door neighbour of Samuel Pepys (popping up frequently in Pepys’s diary), and the founder of the state of Pennsylvania.
David Soul played Detective Ken Hutchinson – ‘Hutch’ – in the 1970s hit TV series Starsky and Hutch.
The man with the telephones is the American modernist composer John Cage, pictured installing them for a performance of his work Variations VII in 1966. His most notorious work is ‘4’33”’, whose score calls for the musicians to play no notes at all for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, meaning that the work sounds entirely different every time depending on the ambient noise wherever it is being performed.
A8
This is about everyday words made up of chemical symbols.
K (potassium), Ni (nickel) and Fe (iron) make a sharp KNiFe; S (sulphur) Au (gold) and Na (sodium) produce steam as a SAuNa; W (tungsten) and Ag (silver) make WAg, the action that dogs perform with their tails when they are happy.
All, it will be noted, depend mostly or entirely on those symbols that bear no relation to the English names of the elements. Nearly all of these reflect the elements’ Latin names: K for potassium derives from ‘kalium’; Fe for iron from ‘ferrum’; Au for gold from ‘aurum’; Na for sodium from ‘natrium’ (our word is a backformed false Latinate derived from ‘soda’); and Ag for silver from the Latin ‘argentum’ (minus the ‘r’, to avoid confusion with argon).
The odd one out is W for tungsten, which derives from the name of its main ore, wolframite, known to science long before the element itself was identified. The origin of the name is the German phrase wolfrahm, meaning ‘wolf’s cream’.
Q9
Why might Shearsmith and Pemberton issue an invitation to Bobby Charlton and an unidentified man on the fourth side of ‘The White Album’?
CLUES
- ‘The White Album’ is a reference to the Beatles.
- If you need a further clue, note where this question comes in this quiz.
Q10
Who might be the canine companion of the apostate emperor, the original dreamer of electric sheep, Mrs Morley and the world’s first trans MP?
CLUES
- You often find canine companions in children’s fiction.
- You may not have heard of all of these people but getting even one or two should give it to you.
A9
Because Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton are the creators of the macabre BBC TV series Inside No.9 (first broadcast in 2014), and they might therefore invite number-nine-related guests.
Sir Bobby Charlton was arguably the most famous footballer to wear the England no. 9 shirt, having done so in the World Cups of 1966 and 1970;
The track ‘Revolution 9’, which takes up a large chunk of the last side of the Beatles’ The Beatles, known as ‘The White Album’ (1968), is a heavily experimental eight-minute-plus collage of cut-up sounds and tape loops assembled largely by John Lennon. It includes the repeated phrase ‘Number 9’ intoned by a well-spoken English voice. It was sourced from tapes used in Royal Academy of Music examinations, which were stored in the sound library at Abbey Road studios. The writer Ian Macdonald has described ‘Revolution 9’ as ‘the world’s most widely distributed avant-garde artefact’.
A10
The four elements in the question give us Julian, Dick, Anne and Georgina – so they represent Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, whose canine companion was Timmy the dog.
The Emperor Julian (Flavius Claudius Julianus), who ruled Rome from ad 361 to 363, is known as The Apostate because of his reversion from Christianity to paganism.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was the novel that inspired the film Blade Runner, and is one of the many works of the American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick.
‘Mrs Morley’ was the name Queen Anne of England used in her private correspondence with her favourite courtier, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. The Duchess in turn was ‘Mrs Freeman’. The nicknames are referred to in the dialogue of the 2018 Oscar-winning movie The Favourite, which (very) freely interprets the private life of Queen Anne.
New Zealand politician Georgina Beyer, born George Bertrand in 1957, was elected Member for Wairarapa in 1999 and is thought to have been the first transsexual person elected to parliament anywhere in the world. Appropriately and famously, in the Blyton stories cousin Georgina also rebels against her birth gender and insists on being known as George.