BBC Radio 4 Brain of Britain Ultimate Quiz Book. Russell Davies

A. Lejeune, the film critic, had a fit of temperament because she couldn’t answer any of the questions put to her, and flatly refused to take part in the recording. I was faced, then, with the task of finding a replacement exactly one hour before the recording. Phillip Slessor was the Announcer on duty, and I accordingly asked him to take part, which he did, and incidentally won the contest! This means he will have to take part again in the Semi-final match to be recorded next Wednesday…

      Miss Lejeune’s fee was cancelled. We’ve rarely seen such a tantrum in recent times, though there was one mid-recording walkout in living memory, leaving three willing contestants still fighting it out to the end. Robert Robinson, the question-master of the day, was all for continuing as if nothing had happened, but Richard Edis, producing, foresaw a likely deluge of baffled phone-calls and letters, so the matter was delicately explained on-air. From time to time, we do see candidates so frantically nervous that they insist their performance is being subverted – the usual culprit, in their eyes, being the button-press system that activates the light (other quizzes use a buzzer) showing that they want to hazard an answer. “Mine’s not working!” they cry, and no amount of technical demonstration will convince them that their light didn’t come on because somebody else pressed their own button first.

      Franklin Engelmann, the first question-master, is remembered as one of the BBC’s great all-rounders. Equipped with a military moustache and a brisk manner, but also a sense of humour, he already had a decade’s experience in front of the microphone. Alert listeners in 1944 might have heard him, as Captain Engelmann of the Royal Engineers, introducing one of Glenn Miller’s concerts from the famous aircraft hangar near Bedford. With Engelmann in charge, the national response to the new show was extremely heartening. Radio reviews in newspapers and magazines enjoyed generous space in those days, and perhaps the most influential to arrive in Joan Clark’s office came from Bernard Hollowood, doubling as a writer and cartoonist at Punch, where he took over as the magazine’s Editor in 1957. The virtues he identified on 5th May 1954 were very much the ones we still prize in the programme today:

      The final of the Light Programme’s Ask Me Another competition, which resulted in a convincing victory for D. Martin Dakin, was vastly entertaining. This is a quiz of extreme simplicity: there is no “signing in” or “celebrity spot”, no tintinnabular guillotining, no facetious humour, no frippery or calculated rudeness. The questions are posed briskly and neatly and the competitors trot out their answers with commendable conviction.

      It was perhaps unfair of Hollowood to praise the radio quiz by bashing the familiar features of television’s What’s My Line? (where Gilbert Harding was synonymous with “calculated rudeness”), especially since the TV show was in no way a quiz. And if there was no “tintinnabular guillotining” in 1954, Brain of Britain certainly does include it now, in the sense that a bell rings to signal the end of a contestant’s ten permitted seconds of thinking-time. But Hollowood’s piece was more interesting on the perennial subject of what kind of knowledge was being, or should be, tested. To him, the term “general knowledge” seemed to denote something desirable, but fairly banal:

      My one criticism of this programme is that too many of the questions call for information from the by-ways of learning, and that not enough questions test the competitors’ general knowledge. Mr Dakin might reasonably have been asked for the finalists in the F.A. Cup Competition, the Bank Rate, the price of butter, Bradman’s Test average, the cost of a dog licence and so on. No doubt he would have produced pat and accurate answers in every case, but in doing so he would have won the hearts as well as the admiration of his “Light” audience.

      Surprisingly perhaps, Joan Clark’s internal reply to her departmental bosses recorded her entire agreement with Hollowood’s points, and admitted that questions had perhaps got a bit too tough:

      Towards the end, as the dead contestants were weeded out, we did indeed stiffen them deliberately. Would you please inform Mr Adam [Kenneth Adam, Head of Light Entertainment] that we will watch this point and also always provide a certain number of topical and general observation questions.

      “General observation” seems roughly to mean “to do with the day-to-day life around us”, and questions of that kind do still occur. One of the semi-finals this year (2017) began with the question: “In February 2017, who was named the first ever female Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, succeeding Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe?” That appointment had only just been made, so the question came as a kind of check that contestants had been reading the news, as well as the histories and reference books. In the event, the right answer, Cressida Dick, came at once. But to my mind, if the quiz were littered with questions taken straight out of the flow of current events and circumstances, as Bernard Hollowood seemed to wish, both the listening public and the competitors would soon tire of it. Part of the pleasure of quizzing is that the contestant impresses and the listenership is impressed, and dog-licence questions are not going to maintain that effect for long. Don Bradman’s Test average, on the other hand, being a famous and memorable statistic, seems a reasonable thing to ask for today, now that it has dropped into the long-ago of cricket history.

      Those were matters for John P. Wynn to consider. The question-setter’s name enters rarely into the collected memos of Joan Clark’s office during this period, but that isn’t to be wondered at, since the two collaborators had been married since 1953, and were living in Dorset Street, W.1. It’s comical to see the two of them solemnly answering enquiries from the outside world with a formula like “I will refer this to our producer, Joan Clark”, or likewise the other way round, when such “referrals” must often have been a matter of pillow-talk. Today’s BBC rules supposedly ban cooperation between married partners, on the grounds that they may “put work each other’s way”, award each other inflated fees, and so forth. Certain senior figures still manage to find ways round this restriction, but in the mid-fifties, nobody seemed to care.

      As interest in the show continued to spread, Wynn was contracted to prepare a What Do You Know? quiz-book of one thousand questions and answers. It was published in 1955 with a dedication to “Joan, for her unfailing support, helpful encouragement and realistic criticism”. Wynn’s introduction called upon his German background to explain the appeal of the programme to “between five and six million persons”:

      We all like to accumulate odd fragments of knowledge and, such is human nature, we all enjoy a certain degree of what the Germans call “Schadenfreude” while we are watching others undergoing an examination. If they know the answer and we don’t – well, we say that they are supposed to be experts and we cannot attempt to emulate their brilliance. If they don’t know the answer, does that not prove that they are not better than we are? But frequently there is that sweet occasion when the expert proves his ignorance while we – we, the unbrilliant, anonymous listeners – beat him in his own field, and are rewarded with the admiring exclamations of our wives, husbands, children and parents.

      Wynn’s remarks about his chosen range of questions (and the book includes the controversial “What is Isinglass, and what is it used for?”) indicate how influential Bernard Hollowood’s strictures had been:

      Experience has shown that it is not the specialised expert who is particularly good at this kind of contest. Therefore, complicated, technical and scientific questions have been omitted altogether and greater attention has been paid to more ordinary and popular matters. Here we often fail to find the right answers: it is astonishing to see how little we know consciously of the little things in life – the colour of a three-halfpenny stamp, the cost of a telephone call, the number of lace holes in a man’s shoe – in short, the things we take for granted, and on which we hardly ever waste a second thought.

      Men of fashion today will be astonished in their turn to see that in 1955, the number of lace holes in a shoe was assumed to be standardised and invariable. In setting his questions, Wynn had his little ways, one of which was to ask two questions at once, as in the isinglass example, or more typically: “What is the difference between a cineraria and a cinerarium?”, where you need to know both terms to answer satisfactorily. He was even capable of splitting a question explicitly into two (“What is a. a Hydrangea and b. Hydraemia?”) or calling for three definitions at once: