It’s easy to forget that the pleasure of a good scratch usually depends on the quality of the original itch. Some itches are simple, shallow affairs – barely thought of and thoughtlessly flicked away. But some itches are resistant to easy friction – maddeningly persistent, multi-layered affairs that will only eventually yield to attacks from all sides. And scratching a self-inflicted itch might be one definition of the quiz show, or at least one explanation of their durable popularity; in a world of unappeasable irritations here is one that we know, with certainty, will pass. An episode of Round Britain Quiz, for example, should offer eight really top-class itches per episode, thoughtfully contrived to make it no simple matter to achieve relief. In some cases, for some people at some particular times, it may even turn out to be practically impossible – as fruitless an endeavour as scratching your right elbow with your right hand – and someone else will have to step in and help.
For the last 12 years that’s been me, the latest in a long line of presenters whose task it has been to put RBQ contestants into a state of mild cerebral misery and then get them out of it again. And it’s a long line of presenters because Round Britain Quiz is, by some distance, the longest running quiz on the air, certainly in this country and probably anywhere. Exactly how old it is depends on whether you include its immediate predecessor – The Transatlantic Quiz, a wartime, alliance-boosting collaboration with the Blue Network in New York, which introduced itself as an ‘unrehearsed, spontaneous programme … carried on across 3,000 miles of ocean and brought to you by short wave transcription’. When the Sterling Crisis of 1947 threatened the survival of this transatlantic co-production, Norman Collins, then Controller of the Light Programme (also commissioner of another of Radio 4’s most venerable programmes – Woman’s Hour) was clearly anxious to avoid a break. ‘While we have been waiting for the Treasury and the Bank of England to make up their minds about dollars,’ he wrote in September of that year, ‘time has been running very short and if we are to maintain continuity with the “Quiz” – and for a variety of reasons I am extremely anxious that this should be so – the first “Trans-Britain Quiz” should be on the air on Sunday, November 2nd.’ After some dithering over the title – both ‘Trans-Britain Quiz’ and ‘Cross-Country Quiz’ were contenders for a while – Round Britain Quiz was approved, with the famously peppery Gilbert Harding as the first travelling quiz-master and Lionel Hale continuing his role as the London question setter.
The programme retained the dual studio, dual quiz-master format, with a regular London team competing each week with different regional teams from around the country. And there was a faint but distinct sense of metropolitan condescension in Collins’s brief to his producers: ‘the general guiding line about questions should, I think, be that all questions directed to the permanent team in London should be entirely general and that questions from the team in London to the Regional team should be general with a flavouring (say two questions among the lot) of Regional reference.’ Interestingly, in the foreword to a predecessor of this book – published in 1950 – one of the regular London contestants, the equally peppery D. W. Brogan, implies that a lofty impartiality was not expected of the local quiz-master, writing of him as ‘watching with jealous care over the interests of his team’. Over the years the essential nature of the quiz – tough questions couched in a cryptic manner – has remained the same as production methods changed. These days each series is recorded over a long weekend at a country house somewhere in the British Isles, the contestants gathering from all corners of the country like the cast of an Agatha Christie murder mystery, to face-off across a hotel conference room during the day and compare their wounds in a hotel dining room in the evening.
It was, from the start, thought of as a contest of ‘wit and knowledge’, not just knowledge alone. Brogan approvingly cites a story about the nineteenth-century scientist Lord Kelvin who, stumped for a rather simple astronomical fact during a lecture to undergraduates, sent a student to his office to look it up for him, specifying exactly on which shelf, how many books in from the left, and on what page of the book the required fact would be found. ‘It is no part of a gentleman’s education to know details,’ Kelvin said grandly to the class, when the student eventually returned with the answer, ‘He should know where they are to be found.’ Something of that patrician disdain for mere ‘details’ has – let’s face it – always been part of the Round Britain Quiz recipe, though judging from some of the questions in the 1950 anthology it didn’t always make it through to the question setters. Today’s teams would be bemused, and surely grateful, to be presented with questions as flatly straightforward as these: ‘Can you give three quotations from song, poetry or prose about kissing?’ or ‘Can you name 3 of the United States of America whose names begin with the letter C?’ Even when the question is a little more cryptic – ‘What bullseye was often hit in Oliver Twist?’ for example – they are distinctly one note by current standards.
These days, I’m glad to say, none of those would pass muster. The perfect Round Britain Quiz question now consists of three or four red herrings swimming in close formation, the true direction of which will only become clear when the conundrum is solved. What’s more, the solution will ideally bring that distinct glow that comes from seeing apparently disparate and unrelatable facts slot neatly into an explanation that was invisible and now seems inevitable. It’s oddly reminiscent of what Freud writes in The Interpretation of Dreams, about the lifelong quiz of our own subconscious:
Suppose I have a picture-puzzle, a rebus, in front of me. It depicts a house with a boat on its roof, a single letter of the alphabet, the figure of a running man whose head has been conjured away, and so on. Now I might be misled into raising objections and declaring that the picture as a whole and its component parts are nonsensical. A boat has no business to be on the roof of a house, and a headless man cannot run. Moreover, the man is bigger than the house; and if the whole picture is intended to represent a landscape, letters of the alphabet are out of place in it since such objects do not occur in nature. But obviously we can only form a proper judgment of the rebus if we put aside criticisms such as these of the whole composition and its parts and if, instead, we try to replace each separate element in some way or other. The words which are put together in this way are no longer nonsensical but may form a poetical phrase of the greatest beauty and significance.
The very best Round Britain Quiz questions, thanks to setters both professional and amateur, will similarly begin in baffling surrealism and end in a kind of poetry.
Trusting the subconscious will help, quite frequently – since the mind often appears to have its own equivalent of Kelvin’s biddable undergraduate – an inner demon that vanishes from the room and returns quite unexpectedly with the necessary fact. At that point, during recordings, I’ll usually hear a noise. The muttering that indicates frustration will give way to a little sigh of recognition. The ‘ah’ of a breakthrough is quite distinctive and, judging from archive recordings, unchanged over the decades. Where accents and attitudes have often changed significantly, sometimes comically so, that impulsive human response to the dawning of the light seems to be timeless. There is, sadly, no guarantee that it won’t precede an answer of dazzlingly ingenious wrongness. Contestants on Round Britain Quiz don’t just bark up the wrong tree sometimes; they climb it, construct a spacious and sturdy treehouse and then begin to fill it with bits of second-hand furniture. And they can get distinctly crestfallen when you insist that they climb down again and look in another part of the wood. That is part of the pleasure for listeners, of course – a pleasure that will be even more refined if they have themselves managed to work out the correct answer. But even listeners still in the dark can enjoy the sound of cleverness confounding itself. As Marcus Berkmann, a regular contestant for the South of England, pointed out in a piece celebrating the seventieth anniversary of the programme, ‘You have to relax because the questions are so hard that the worst you can do is very badly indeed. But listeners seem to quite like that, as long as you are entertaining as you fail.’ It is one of the distinctive marks of a good question that it will always have at least one loose thread that the teams can begin to unpick, so that we can enjoy them diligently following it to entirely the wrong conclusion.
For the quizmaster the challenges are a little different. I know the answers but I have no idea which route the teams are going to take on the way to them. And more often than not my guidance is sought when the contestant has travelled a long way down the backroads of their own knowledge. ‘Ah … Yes! … Now … could we be talking about the seventh session of the Second Council of Nicea here?’ someone will ask, a look of quiet satisfaction already beginning to form on their face. Which is a question you can only satisfactorily answer if you know what was actually discussed at the seventh session of the Second Council of Nicea. If you don’t, a slightly feeble ‘possibly’ is the only workable response, usually coupled, in my case, with a panicked look towards Round Britain Quiz’s long-running producer Paul Bajoria, a man whose general knowledge is measureless and who also, helpfully, has very eloquent eyebrows. His breadth of knowledge is not always helpful; a few seasons ago Paul included a question which depended on knowing what the Maunder Minimum is (it’s a notable late seventeenth-century dearth of sunspots, if you’re curious). My protest, that none of the six or seven people on Earth who might know this fact were actually taking part in Round Britain Quiz that year, was dismissed by Paul as too pessimistic. When the question came up I think we gave the team 1 point out of sheer remorse and, ever since, ‘Maunder Minimum’ has become a shorthand for the completely unplayable lie, the Round Britain Quiz equivalent of finding your golf ball plugged inside a cast-iron drainpipe.
Which brings us to the scoring – the one enigma on Round Britain Quiz which will probably never be satisfactorily resolved. The rough rule of thumb here is that you start with 6 points and lose 1 for every substantial nudge you have to be given. But we’re in the realm of art here not science, and listeners at home – baffled by what occasionally appears to be a disjunction between performance and reward – aren’t always aware that a lot of stumbling and coaxing may have been tidied out of the final edit. (There is an appeal to listening to an intellect in trouble, but there’s only so much silence Radio 4 is happy to broadcast.) In any case, an inaudible conclave has usually taken place before the more problematic awards, a look of appeal from me being followed by a show of fingers from the show’s crucial, but unheard contributors: Lizzie Foster, the programme’s assistant producer; Phil Booth, the sound engineer; and Paul himself. Paul is forgivingly generous, Lizzie is sternly demanding, and between those two poles we collectively get something that approximates justice. There is no appeals procedure, which doesn’t, of course, stop teams from trying.
If the question is a good one, though, even those sent away with only 1 point have the consolation of resolution. They racked their brains over something that didn’t make sense, and now it does, a consummation that the world at large doesn’t offer nearly often enough. Relish that feeling if you achieve it by thought alone as you tackle the questions in this book. Judge yourself kindly if you don’t – every piece of knowledge is a Maunder Minimum if you’ve never encountered it before. But either way, enjoy the itch.