Читать книгу The Times Quiz Book: 4000 challenging general knowledge questions - Olav Bjortomt - Страница 5

Introduction

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 in chief John Witherow – though admittedly, I was terrified that he would have some sort of problem with the quiz (thankfully, all I got was enthusiasm – I was later told that John had become addicted to the daily quiz during a cruise and so “could I do more questions?” “Err, okay”).

Alas, once I could just do the five questions every morning for publication the very next day: whatever popped into my head, in fact. Ninety-five questions per week demands a far more efficient and wide-ranging operation. In fact, I’d estimate that the quiz takes me up 10-12 hours to compile: filing three quizzes on Friday and three more on Monday.

While I could once rely on whatever novel I was reading, film I had just seen or album I was listening to, now I had to comb sources properly (though the mighty Wikipedia is always my first port of call); make sure I was covering all the quiz subjects (because when I don’t, I get letters asking “where is the science?”, “where is the classical music?”) and try to never, ever repeat a question (though I invariably do, every three months on average). Even if I may fail on occasion, the overall aim is to always be interesting.

I keep two text files for maintenance, one headlined “times2quizzes (master)”, which contains every quiz I’ve ever done for The Times (with over 26,000 questions); the other: “times2 questions reserve”, which is a file containing containing 742 pages with an average of 20-25 questions per page. These are questions that might go into the quiz one day, if most of them weren’t too long or incredibly, unbelievable hard by far. Meanwhile new questions are written for this file every day.

So when I compile the quizzes, I have good base of existing material to work from, though the urge is always to use new stuff or whatever morning inspirations I’ve had. The aim is to cover each core quiz subject: film, literature, history, current affairs, art, geography, politics, theatre, sport, with an unconscious emphasis on arts and books because that is what I truly love. Then, when the final 15/20 is done, the verification starts.

Checking the questions can change the quiz irrevocably. Because verification is a serious business: it often takes longer to check the quiz than write it. Aside from vast chunks of wording being rewritten, what cannot be double or triple sourced must be excised.

Therefore I always take these opportunities to insert a much easier question in place of what has been rejected (on average, this happens about three times per quiz). So the quiz I started with – believe it or not, people will gasp – was much harder than the one that ends up in the newspaper (of which about 75 per cent has survived). Then there are the queries about what I have written, in which vocabulary and phrasing are interrogated so thoroughly, it might bring out a burst of inane giggles just to read the emails exchanged between myself and the times2 puzzles desk.

The process has no doubt helped me in my life as what has been termed a “professional” quizzer, however. Since the quiz went to 10 questions I have won two European individual titles and one World individual title in the big wide world of quizzing. Checking sources thoroughly, nay obsessively, has helped me become a champion quizzer, searing thousands of facts on my brain.

And when an error slips through? There is hell to pay. I sometimes wish I had never been born, such is the probably deserved opprobrium I have been showered with by disgusted Times readers. But others are quick to shower the quiz with love when it stirs a half-forgotten memory of a place they had once lived or an obscure autoimmune disorder-type disease that needs as much public exposure as it can get. Even, if such knowledge has been turned into a mere quiz question.

All of the questions you will find within these pages are, I hope, either challenging, interesting or enlightening. Some questions – if fortune has favoured my setting – might even satisfy all three requirements.

So, please, enjoy…

Olav Bjortomt