The Times Quiz Book: 4000 challenging general knowledge questions. Olav Bjortomt
Читать онлайн.| Название | The Times Quiz Book: 4000 challenging general knowledge questions |
|---|---|
| Автор произведения | Olav Bjortomt |
| Жанр | Справочная литература: прочее |
| Серия | |
| Издательство | Справочная литература: прочее |
| Год выпуска | 0 |
| isbn | 9780008209551 |
It started with a call to come down to the features department back in the summer of 2005. Mike Harvey, a former news editor turned features editor who had absolutely terrified me during my time as a graduate trainee on the newsdesk, said he wanted me to do the T2 quiz from now on.
He had heard from fellow staff members of my sterling performances at the celebrity-studded PEN quiz and thought that I could inject some life into the little bit of the T2 back page occupied by five questions every day, since it appeared that someone – any one on the features staff – had just been using a bunch of boring old quiz books to compile it. Also, I had noticed the cardinal sin of the same questions being repeated; it was as if nobody cared.
So I took it upon myself to bring out some really interesting questions. To mould a new and fascinating T2 quiz. But when I say “interesting” (the origin of the Harrington jacket name; the origin of the phrase “banana republic”), I thought, wow, this’ll knock the socks off those readers who by now must be so angered by the dullness of the existing quiz that such questions would be an instant panacea.
I could not have been more wrong. The reaction was instantaneous and it was devastating. Reader emails poured in asking how had this insanely, obscure trivia nonsense taken the place of the normal quiz? They asked: why? I had totally misjudged its then tone. So action on the editing side had to be taken. Jonathan, my “controller” on T2 as it were, took it upon himself to regulate then quiz’s content.
The problem was Jonathan was Australian and general knowledge culture can vary wildly from country to country. Therefore, we exchanged several emails where I had to explain the cultural import of things like “Alcock and Brown” – who made the non-stop first transatlantic flight in 1919 – because Jonathan flatly rejected the question as he had never heard of them. Rejected questions followed in their dozens: I understood why on some occasions; other times, I fumed at the assumptions made.
The difficult beginnings of my quiz were also fraught with rudimentary factual errors – naively, I never bothered to verify every question; trusting my own noggin to be faithful and to be true. This was disastrous behaviour on my part. One example? I said Z in the NATO Phonetic Alphabet stood for Zebra. Idiot. Of course, it is Zulu.
But things settled down; the rejections dwindled from a flood to a trickle after a few months, and apart from one telephone call from Mike about two years later, in which he mentioned off-handed how “bloody difficult” the quiz was, no more complaints about the quiz’s perceived fairness were received.
Other incidents stick out in the memory. The Mayor of Alnwick once hunted me down because she was convinced that Alnwick and not Morpeth was the county town or administrative centre of Northumberland. In that instance, however, I was correct (and for once, I’d actually been there).
I never complained when the quiz was “rested” for the sake of an advert taking its allotted space – an advert that sometimes, if I recall correctly, wanted to cure male impotence – but apparently enough fans complained about its frequent absences for such rests to stop and for the quiz to do its then five-a-day thing.
Another odd thing was a mysterious sub-editor’s insistence that the fifth question always be a sports one – he or she just kept on inserting his own questions. Their sports question just kept on turning up in place of whatever general knowledge question I had intended for that spot. I never bothered to ask why – I was paid regardless. Although this was not my innovation, it is one that I took over and stays with the quiz to this day, and one that has greatly increased my sports knowledge and appreciation of sporting life.
Of course, the following book only has 20 question quizzes (the Qs I have chosen for these quizzes are my absolute favourites, culled from the tens of thousands I have written over the past decade). The quiz has grown from five questions to ten (from February 2014) and then to 15 per day and 20 on a Saturday with an added daily picture question (from February 2015). The jumps in growth have been thanks to editor enthusiasm, first from online news editor Pat Long, then from the actual editor