Q1
On which island could you notionally find the captain of a ship, a Tennessee Williams character played by Brando, a ska trombonist, and a soldier at the bottom of the pecking order?
CLUES
- This is probably one for millennials.
- The captain is a general term for a captain, not a specific captain.
Q2
Which composer with Manchester and Orkney associations is connected with the father of quantum physics, a pioneer of movie make-up and a computer-generated talk-show host – and why would you struggle to turn them up any louder?
CLUES
- You’re looking for a name common to all of them.
- The talk-show host – somewhat ahead of his time – dates from the 1980s.
A1
On Madagascar – because these are the names of the four penguins in the movie Madagascar and its sequels, who went on to star in a caper of their own in 2014.
The leader of the penguins (the ‘sensible’ one) is called Skipper.
Marlon Brando played Stanley Kowalski on Broadway and in the 1951 movie of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Kowalski is one of the most common of all Polish family names, being literally the equivalent of ‘Smith’.
The late ‘Rico’ Rodriguez (1934–2015) was one of the best known ska musicians in the UK, having moved there from Jamaica in 1961 and played with many influential bands including the Specials and Jools Holland.
The fourth penguin is called Private, the lowest rank of soldier in an army. The use of the phrase ‘pecking order’ might provide a further clue to the theme here.
A2
The composer is Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (1934–2016), the former Master of the Queen’s Music, was always known to his friends as Max. The others are all connected, and can’t be turned up, because they are all already ‘Max’.
Born in Salford, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s career began as a teenager when he was spotted by the BBC in Manchester and given the job of regularly composing music for the
radio show Children’s Hour. He settled in Orkney in 1971, where the surroundings inspired much of his later music, and founded a music festival there.
Max Planck (1858–1947) formulated the quantum theory of electromagnetic energy, in 1900. Since the theory was not compatible with classical physical laws, it paved the way for quantum physics and a whole new approach to the theory of the universe. Planck won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918.
Max Factor Sr (Maximilian Faktorovich, 1877–1938), born in Łodz in Russian Poland, emigrated to the US in 1904 and made his name manufacturing wigs and stage make-up for the fledgling film industry – before his company turned into one of the world’s leading cosmetics brands.
Max Headroom was a computer-generated host of a Channel 4 series first shown in 1985. The character was played by Matt Frewer and was supposedly synthesized from the memories of Edison Carter, the name ‘Max Headroom’ having been the last words Carter saw before a road accident plunged him into a coma. Computer technology wasn’t advanced enough at the time to create a genuine computer-animated character for a TV series on this budget – so the illusion was created with prosthetic make-up. The show was mainly a vehicle for playing pop videos.
Q3
What pattern might you see in a Mad man, a Beryl Bainbridge novel and a school in Hertfordshire?
CLUES
- The word ‘pattern’ is not used randomly.
- See if you can stitch together the elements here.
Q4
What sacred number might connect Enid Blyton, George Axelrod, Akira Kurosawa, St Giles in the Fields and the cliffs of Sussex?
CLUES
- George Axelrod, the least familiar name here, is a playwright, one of whose works became a famous film.
- When you see this connection you’ll think it’s magnificent.
A3
Perhaps a pattern from which clothing is made – because these all have names pertaining to clothing.
A Mad man is Don Draper, played by Jon Hamm in the TV series Mad Men, the creative director of fictional Manhattan ad agency Sterling Cooper. Mad is short for Madison Avenue, where all of the ad agencies were headquartered in the 1950s. Draper’s character is, apparently, at least partly inspired by a real-life ad executive called Draper Daniels.
One of the best known and most successful of the late Beryl Bainbridge’s novels is The Dressmaker, shortlisted for the 1973 Booker Prize. Macabre and semi-autobiographical, it’s about a dressmaker and her sister in the north of England during the Second World War, who are looking after a teenage girl who’s having a delusional relationship with an American soldier.
The school in Hertfordshire is the public school known as Haberdashers’, more fully Haberdashers’ Aske’s, in Elstree, founded in 1690 by a Royal Charter granted to the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers to establish a hospital for 20 boarders with funds from the legacy of the wealthy London cloth merchant Robert Aske.
A4
Seven: a number with mystical and ritual significance in many cultures and religions since ancient times.
Enid Blyton’s 15 Secret Seven books, featuring the crime-solving adventures of a troupe of pre-teens, appeared between 1949 and 1963.
George Axelrod (1922–2003) wrote the play The Seven Year Itch (1952), which became the 1955 Billy Wilder film with Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell.
Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai, 1954) was adapted by Hollywood as The Magnificent Seven (1960).
The area of London known as Seven Dials, just off St Giles High Street, was named because a pillar stood at the apex of seven radiating streets at its heart, bearing sundials facing in each direction. (Curiously, in fact there were only ever six sundials on the pillar.) In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Seven Dials was a notorious den of vice, and became one of the worst slums of the Victorian city, as chronicled in the writings of Dickens and the art of Gustave Doré.
The chain of chalk cliffs along the Sussex Heritage Coast between Cuckmere Haven and Beachy Head is known as the Seven Sisters.
Q5
An Art Nouveau architect, a victorious Civil War leader and a Metropolitan Police Commissioner might all be said to betray epic ambitions: why?
CLUES
- Interestingly the word Metropolitan is important in the life of the architect, too.
- It may have been their parents who had ambitions for them, when they named them.
Q6
Why ought you to beware of Haematopus ostralegus, a coveted waterproof watch and bovine testicles, unless there’s an R in the month?
CLUES
- Like most RBQ questions, it will take some effort to prise this one open.
- Familiarity with the theme here would once have meant you were quite poor, but it now suggests luxury.
A5
Because they all share forenames with people who feature in the story of the Trojan War.
The architect is Hector Guimard (1867–1942), French pioneer of the Art Nouveau style whose work includes the famous entrances and lettering of the Paris Metro stations.
The leader of the victorious Union army in the American Civil War was Ulysses S. Grant (1822–85), subsequently the eighteenth president of the USA.
Cressida Dick (b.1960) became the first ever female Commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, and thus the UK’s most senior police officer, in 2017.
A6
Because these all have an oyster connection: and the wisdom is that you should never eat an oyster unless there’s an R in the month, meaning that you avoid them during the ‘close season’ between May and August.
Haematopus ostralegus is a wading bird, the common oystercatcher.
In developing the world’s first waterproof watch the Rolex company founder Hans Wilsdorf named it an oyster, in reference to the watertight seal of an oyster’s shell.
Cooked calves’ testicles, eaten as a delicacy, are known as prairie oysters.
Q7
How would you once have gone about finding the phone numbers of the following?
CLUES
- The third picture is a self-portrait.
- The name of the particular cyclist here is not strictly relevant.
Q8
What might the first British Formula One champion, a jazz warrior and a senior conductor knighted in 2008 be doing in the countryside?
CLUES
- The Formula One champion is, sadly, a somewhat tragic figure.
- All of these people have grown on the British public over time.
A7
You’d probably (once upon a time, at least) have looked in the Yellow Pages.
The images depict: the Beatles in a promotional poster for the 1969 cartoon film Yellow Submarine; Geraint Thomas winning the 2018 Tour de France and thereby taking the Yellow Jersey; and a self-portrait by Aubrey Beardsley, who was closely associated with the racy and controversial 1890s periodical The Yellow Book.
A8
They might just be growing there – their names suggest three common native British species of tree.
Mike Hawthorn (1929–59) won the Formula One Drivers’ Championship in 1958. His career was marred by his involvement in more than one race that ended fatally for another driver. He himself died tragically young in a car accident soon after his retirement.
The jazz warrior is Courtney Pine (b.1964), British jazz multi-instrumentalist, founder of the Jazz Warriors in the 1980s; he’s an ambassador, broadcaster, popularizer and communicator as well as a performer of contemporary jazz.
Sir Mark Elder (b.1947) is one of Britain’s foremost orchestral conductors, appointed Music Director of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester in 1999, knighted for services to music in 2008 and appointed a Companion of Honour in 2017.
Q9
If you wanted to find some youths who’d do favours for you at a public school, an assassinated San Francisco politician, and two waltzes by Offenbach and Johann Strauss II, why might you go and see Tjinder Singh?
CLUES
- You’re looking for some everyday objects here.
- The politician has been the subject of a film.
Q10
How would you classify a horny structure in a horse’s hoof, a child traumatized by aliens and a tense Belgian crime drama?
CLUES
- There is a connection with the animal kingdom throughout.
- Would it make it slightly easier to give Aliens a capital letter?
A9
Because Tjinder Singh is the creative genius behind the band Cornershop – and these all suggest items you would pick up at the corner shop.
Fags are boys who traditionally did menial jobs for senior pupils at English public schools.
The assassinated politician was the openly gay San Francisco legislative official Harvey Milk, shot dead with the city’s Mayor George Moscone in November 1978 by a grudgeful fellow official.
The two waltzes by Offenbach and Strauss, composed in 1863 for a ball organized by the Vienna Authors and Journalists’ Association, were respectively given the names ‘Abendblätter’ and ‘Morgenblätter’ (‘Evening Papers’ and ‘Morning Papers’).
A10
You would classify them as amphibians because they are a frog, a Newt and a Salamander.
A frog is a triangular horny structure in the underside of a horse’s hoof.
Newt is the human child struck dumb by terror, discovered and befriended by Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) after everyone else in her colony has been killed by aliens in the James Cameron sci-fi classic Aliens (1986). She was played by Carrie Henn.
The crime drama series Salamander, starring Filip Peeters as Police Inspector Paul Gerardi, was first broadcast in 2012.