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

(a lover of women) would have sufficed to test most competitors.

      Never slow to exploit a success, even in its days of broadcasting monopoly, the Television Service of the BBC brought What Do You Know? into the picture in 1954. A technical failure spoilt the chances of the sample programme shown to the Controller, Programmes, Television, though Cecil McGivern found other grounds for disdain. “It was more than a pity,” said his memo, “that the producer lost one camera in Studio H before this programme started. Shooting it on two cameras ruined it, for me, anyway… I felt in its present form it was not strong enough for television, and that we have better ideas we are not using yet.” A lucky escape for the show, perhaps, but not a permanent one.

      Safely back in radio, Joan Clark turned to the cosy task of choosing a trophy for the winner of her next series, and getting the object paid for. A nine-and-a-half-inch high sterling silver cup on a long stem, she discovered, would cost £20, with engraving something under £1 extra. A diploma printed on parchment with capital letters in gold at 8 guineas, with 2 guineas extra for framing, proved more acceptable to the managers. Yet on the programme side, costly expansionism was not discouraged. Going into Europe with a set of What Do You Know: Continental Exchange quizzes, Miss Clark passionately requested travel-permission on her husband’s behalf, enabling Wynn to assist the compère at the European end of the wire. “He is fluent in Danish, German and French,” she assured the Assistant Head of Variety. The couple were prospering, as could be seen in the early days of 1957, when the producer Alfred Dunning took temporary charge of What Do You Know? Its usual proprietors were absent, but would be contactable, they said, at the Bird of Paradise Inn, Tobago, and thereafter at the Sunny Caribbean Hotel, Bequia, via St Vincent, both in the British West Indies.

      A moment of relaxed celebration was perhaps in order, since further expansion of their quiz empire lay ahead. BBC Television had not gone away. Even though the doubting Cecil McGivern was now its Deputy Director, the service had decided that What Do You Know? would suit the screen after all, with a revised format, and lightly disguised under a title rescued from its earlier habitation, Ask Me Another. With Franklin Engelmann again in the chair, the show came on air in June 1958, presenting what strikes us now as an Egghead-like scheme: a trio of regulars against a team of challengers. In time, a classic trio of What Do You Know? veterans formed itself, with Dr Reginald Webster (Brain of Britain 1959), Olive Stephens, a rector’s wife from Wales, and Farmer Ted Moult, as he was usually billed in those days.

      Moult wasn’t a champion at all. He was knowledgeable, but hadn’t got beyond the first round of What Do You Know? – causing him to confess disarmingly forever afterwards that his entire career had been based on failure. Yet the radio audience had recognised him at once as a potential national treasure, in the ripe-eccentric category, and he soon became a popular guest in many odd corners of broadcasting. Ask Me Another thrived on TV: its very first edition, Joan Clark wrote in a delighted memo, “had an Appreciation [Index] of 78, which I have been told is the highest this year in BBC Light Entertainment, with the exception of the appearance of A. E. Matthews in This Is Your Life”. (Almost ninety at the time, the hilariously unpredictable actor A. E. Matthews took over the show, during which, according to the autobiography of its host, Eamonn Andrews, Matty “snorted, contradicted, interrupted, laughed, and at one stage even stretched out on the couch and said he was going to have a snooze”.)

      The success of its television cousin had no traceable effect on the reputation of the radio original – though it’s true that by now, quizzes in general were beginning to come under fire from academic specialists. In 1958, the Brain office took note of a report in The Times:

      In an article entitled “BBC Quiz Shows Misguided”, Professor Cannon from Manchester University gave a talk to 500 schoolboys which espoused the view: “Do not follow the lead of the BBC in their accursed quiz programmes and think that mere knowledge of facts is education. … The whole idea is utter nonsense and is definitely against the ideas of education which the teachers are trying to instil in you.”

      Nobody at the BBC had actually equated education with “facts”. Professor Cannon (who must have been the zoologist Herbert Graham Cannon, FRS FRSE FLS FRMS) would have been on surer ground if he’d attacked the notion that a command of facts makes you “brainy”, in the popular sense. Many Brains of Britain have been hailed by journalists as “the cleverest man in the country”, but not many have made any such claim on their own account. In fact, plenty of excellent contestants in my own time have said, “I’m not hugely intelligent, but I organise information quite well, and I’ve always had a very good memory,” or words to that effect.

      If anyone besides Professor Cannon thought What Do You Know? needed refreshment, they certainly felt some uplift in 1961, with the popular series win by Irene Thomas, a former singer and chorus-girl. The tournament had not been a relentless pleasure for Mrs Thomas. She revealed, for example, that after her first appearance on the show, the rest of the competitors had shoved off to the men-only Garrick Club without her. What’s more, Mrs Thomas had kept a file of letters from BBC producers, recording the various reasons given, over several years, for turning down her applications to appear in radio programmes. It’s hard to imagine that Joan Clark was one of the guilty respondents, at least judging by the schedule of engagements she drew up for Mrs Thomas in the immediate aftermath of her win:

      I have arranged with Geoffrey Edwards of Publicity the following coverage:

       1) A 10-15 minute recording for Today on Friday

       2) A piece in South-East News on Friday evening

       3) A press conference – to which a number of newspaper and radio columnists have been invited – on Thursday afternoon.

      Irene Thomas went on to win the Brain of Brains title, in which the three most recent winners competed. But she failed to carry off the Top Brain accolade, which comes round on a nine-year cycle, bringing the three most recent Brains of Brains into contention. That prize was taken by the 1956 Brain of Britain, Antony Carr from Menai Bridge, who had been only 18 at the time, and was now 24. Carr had just left school in 1956, and was delivering newspapers for something to do. He recalled “Paperboy Wins Brain Of Britain!” as one of the choice headlines of the time. Carr took home one of the famous diplomas, and a £5 record token. Later he became a Professor of Welsh Medieval History, and is still an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of History and Welsh History at Bangor University.

      The BBC, eccentric in so many things, felt it worthwhile to preserve a small list of the questions young Carr didn’t get right during his climactic Top Brain triumph. One of them shows John P. Wynn manfully trying to keep up-to-date as the sixties got into gear:

       Q: “Ya Ya” seems to be the latest expression to come to this country from America. What does it mean?

       A: It means, so we are told, a “steady date”.

      In neither the question nor the answer did Wynn sound fully confident of that information.

      Generally, when he faltered in setting a question, it was over low-level trivia, the sort of day-to-day stuff that Bernard Hollowood had recommended he specialise in. Wynn should have known better, for example, than to ask “Which football club is known as ‘The Blues’?”, and to insist on the answer “Birmingham City”, when half a dozen clubs are known to their most faithful fans by that name. Ruling “Chelsea” to be a wrong answer, as he did (Wynn appeared on stage as a silent adjudicator) was sure to incense large numbers of Londoners. The BBC Radio sports producer Bert Kingdon, later Head of Outside Broadcasts, was one of those who registered an objection in writing, and the personal reply Wynn sent him, intended to defeat his argument, only demonstrated that Wynn himself didn’t quite grasp the nature of his error:

      I have to be very careful when setting question[s] for this programme. Had Franklin Engelmann accepted the answer “Chelsea”, as you suggest, we would have got thousands of letters from Birmingham City fans accusing us of malpractice and tearing my pants off. So, I have made it a rule to stick very closely to authoritative reference books and information given by the official bodies concerned.

      Evidently