A beloved former panellist on Round Britain Quiz routinely used to lean back after a recording was over and sigh, ‘The people who set these questions have warped minds.’ The production team is indebted to a whole floating population of warped minds who have written for the show over the years. The work of Sue Barnard, David Edwards, Stephen Follows, Mark Mason, Stewart McCartney, Beth Porter and Danny Roth is excerpted here, with their generous permission. Listeners’ ideas are also invaluable in the programmes, and some of the very cleverest of these are included in the final sections of the book.
RBQ might easily have died off in the mid-1990s, had Gaynor Vaughan Jones not entrusted this strange jewel of BBC radio heritage to one of her least experienced producers. My bosses have both provided support and allowed creative freedom ever since: Nicola Swords, Ian Bent and the late John Pidgeon, not to mention the successive Radio 4 controllers whose faith has ensured it’s reached the age of 70 – and counting.
I’ve had the privilege of working with two brilliant presenters of Round Britain Quiz, Nick Clarke and Tom Sutcliffe, whose rock-solid and charming chairmanship has surely done more than anything to perpetuate the programme’s success. Their wit and attention to detail are all over this book. There would also be no show without the panellists – too many since I took over to list, now, but all remarkable. Their erudition and epiphanies and agonies and exasperation guarantee weekly hilarity and drama. Lizzie Foster, Stephen Garner, Paul Hardy and Angela Sherwin have, successively and sometimes collaboratively, worked incredibly hard over the years to make sure the questions are factually accurate, and achieved many other cheerful organizational miracles to get RBQ on air.
Finally, a huge thank you to Nell Warner and her team for making a discursive cult radio show work so absorbingly on the printed page.
Paul Bajoria