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INTRODUCTION

As I write, the BBC radio show Brain of Britain is approaching its 65th season, which makes it the most venerable of general knowledge quizzes anywhere. It’s beautifully simple: one mark for each correct answer, and a bonus mark for five correct answers in a row. The contestants come from all over the United Kingdom, and many of them seem to feel honoured to take part. An information sheet used to be sent out to them, with the times and places of the recordings, and a little note saying that there would be a small broadcast fee of £50. The producer of the time used to get letters back asking, “Where do we send the money?”. Our quizzers believed they had to pay to take part – and they were happy to do it.

What kind of knowledge is being tested? What does “general” mean? Well, the debate about that goes on from decade to decade, with the answer changing, not quite visibly, all the time. In the old days, for instance, you could get away with knowing almost nothing about science at all: in fact, the subject was more or less avoided. But now, since it’s clearly one of the bases of civilisation, science must be properly covered – but preferably without baffling us all with jargon. It’s a difficult balance to strike, but ideally there should always be that moment of delight when we learn something new. A good quiz question, I think, is the one that makes the listener say, “Really? Well I never knew that”, in a pleased sort of way. A while ago on the show, I found myself reading out a question which seemed to sum up the quiz experience as we see it. “Which character in a Dickens novel,” I asked, “often used the saying ‘When found, make a note of?’” What interested me most was not the answer (Captain Cuttle in Dombey and Son) but the idea that a certain class of information is interesting enough in itself to merit jotting down. It won’t normally be useful information, vital to the task of living, but there’s some element of surprise in it that makes it pleasurable to learn, and keep in memory.

There will never be a better moment than this to tell the programme’s story, so I’m going to do it, if only to pay due tribute to its originators: the pioneering producer Joan Clark, and John P. Wynn the inventor and first question-setter of the show, which originally went by the name of What Do You Know? Wynn in particular is a slightly mysterious figure, though he was a familiar name in the Radio Times of a lifetime ago, whether as author, scriptwriter, or what BBC memos liked to call the “devisor” of programmes. (Here, the quiz-master’s passion for correctness kicks in, causing me to protest that “devisor” is a legal term meaning testator, one who bequeaths things: one who shapes and plans things is their “deviser”.) But I imagine that few listeners at the time knew how the life story of “John Peter Wynn” had developed up to that point. How many were aware that he had been Hans Wolfgang Priwin, a Jewish immigrant from Germany – indeed, a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of German National Jews? To me, Wynn’s turbulent prequiz history is fascinating, but its complexities (which even involve Ian Fleming at a certain point) would hold up the story if I told it here. Readers with an interest in bumptious mavericks will find the whole tale in the Appendix at the back of this book.

We can join that tale in 1947, the year when, with a decade’s worth of sponsors to back him up, Hans W. Priwin became a naturalised British citizen. For a brief period, he was known as John Peter Priwin, until in 1948 he changed his name by deed poll to John Peter Wynn – a nonchalant variation on the original syllables. He had used J. P. Wynn before the war, as a nom-de-plume, and now he was busily writing for the BBC again, while his future producer, Joan Clark, was beginning her career as “Quiz-Queen of Radio” by getting Top of the Form off the ground. That general knowledge quiz for secondary schools ran for 38 years, starting in 1948, and Joan Clark remained in charge of it until her retirement. The lack of a parallel series for adult contestants must have been noted quite soon, but it wasn’t remedied until Wynn produced a plan for the “experimental 45-60-minute programme” that became, in 1953, What Do You Know? Embedded in this feature was to be a quiz called Ask Me Another. (Apparently not even the term “quiz” itself was securely planted in the BBC mind at this stage, for when the Assistant Head of the Midland Region informed London that he’d been working up a programme with the same title, which he agreed to relinquish, he referred to his production as a “Quizz” throughout.)

But the title-within-a-title has caused confusion ever since. When Wynn’s Clark-produced quiz eventually escaped from its housing within the bigger programme and went solo, it became What Do You Know? Ask Me Another reappeared later as the title of the televised adaptation of the same quiz. It was only in 1967 that Brain of Britain was announced as the new title, though that form of words appeared in Joan Clark’s internal BBC communications as early as 8th January 1954, when she wrote:

Throughout the run of this programme we have arranged the quiz session Ask Me Another with a definite purpose in view – namely to find a Brain of Britain.

That wasn’t completely true. At the beginning of the story, competitors drawn from the general public were token presences only. Celebrities of the day took three places out of four on the panel, and the first professional trio were Lionel Hale (a radio question-master in his own right), Anona Winn (actress, and a regular panellist on Twenty Questions and, later, Petticoat Line), and Bernard Palmer, introduced as “a very brave young man who challenged these well-known broadcasters, a twenty-three-year-old university student from King’s College”. Ten years later, when a recreation of that inaugural panel was attempted for commemorative purposes, this particular Bernard Palmer could not be located (though there were others in the broadcasting sphere). The celebrities gradually dropped out over the following two seasons, one reason being that they had to be paid according to professional standards, while “civilians” cost only a small standard broadcast-fee, plus their expenses.

But Joan Clark had always taken a more democratic view of panellism anyway, so that once her scheme (another Wynn invention) for auditioning amateur contestants on a regional basis had been accepted, she was able to write a triumphant memo to BBC Radio’s Head of Variety: “The Quiz has really reached the dimensions of the ‘Brain of Britain’, as I have auditioned hundreds of people throughout the British Isles…” this was actually an arduous process. If suitable contestants for the microphone were to be assembled, reliable auditioners had to be nominated, briefed and pressed for results all over the country, and a large amount of the programme’s paperwork was taken up with this preparatory rigmarole. Eventually, the telephone proved a workable, and of course much cheaper, option. Today’s system involves testing every hopeful with a sequence of twenty-five questions, which they answer without being told whether their answer is correct or not. When all the responses are in, and arranged in order of merit, the top 48 are offered the chance to participate.

Hardly had the first series got going in 1953 when a couple of problems emerged. While rare in their subsequent occurrence, they would always have to be borne in mind as possible dangers to the normal running of What Do You Know? and later, Brain of Britain. The first was simple error in the question-setting, which as early as August 1953 required the Light Programme continuity announcer to add, at the end of one broadcast:

Before leaving What Do You Know?, we would like to thank all those who wrote in pointing out that in last week’s quiz, we made the common mistake of confusing Isinglass with Waterglass. Isinglass is not, as we said, used for preserving eggs. It is principally used for the clarification of fermented liquors such as beers, wines, etc. Sorry for our mistake!

The attempts to soften the blow here – objectors are thanked for their help, it’s a “common mistake”, and so on – don’t quite set aside the embarrassment of the moment. Another point that producers and presenters make in self-defence is that “nobody protested about it at the time”, which is very often true. People tend to be polite and accepting, preferring to grumble afterwards at most. That’s why contestants today, and for some time past, have been encouraged to speak out forcefully as soon as they suspect a real mistake has been made, because waiting to lodge an objection, even just till the end of a round of questions, can distort the rightful shape of a contest in ways that are impossible to remedy.

Downright errors don’t appear often, and disappointing behaviour from a contestant is even rarer – but it can happen, as Joan Clark found on one of her earliest outings. The incident required a detailed report to the Radio Variety Manager:

During the rehearsal for the quiz session of the above programme yesterday, Miss C. 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: “What is the difference between a philologist, philogynist and a philodendron?” – where probably “What is a philogynist?” (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 Wynn hadn’t realised that the authority of a reference book is a lifeless thing when set against the raucous passions of traditional football supportership. His mollifying tactic on this occasion was to undertake to consult Bert Kingdon over any niceties lurking in future sports questions. And a P.S. from Kingdon’s follow-up letter (“I was pleased to be able to help you on some of your questions this week”) suggested that the belly-tickling had worked.

Of course, many of the questions Wynn posed couldn’t be answered in the same way now. In asking which of the bridges over the Thames was nearest to the mouth of that river, he was looking for the answer “Tower Bridge”. There was no elevated Dartford Crossing (Queen Elizabeth II Bridge) till 1991. But more telling are the questions that would be answered differently now because of changes in the social, rather than material, landscape. In the summer of 1964, there came the question: “How many Cathedrals has London?” The desired reply was three: “St Paul’s Cathedral, Southwark Cathedral and the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral.” But calls came in immediately from licence-payers who already lived, mentally, in a multicultural Britain. “Listeners point out that there are, in fact, two more – St Sophia’s (Greek Orthodox) and the Cathedral of the Holy Assumption of Our Lady (Russian Orthodox).” Joan Clark, whose assistant Sylvia Kirby signed this internal memo, was not inclined to accept the point. “However, we were obviously referring to the famous London Cathedrals, and did not expect our contestants to have any knowledge of the Russian or Greek churches.” Well, it is no longer “obvious” that only the “famous” cathedrals should be counted, so those expectations have irrevocably changed.

With retirement just a few years away now, Miss Clark was in commemorative mood. She suggested a ten-year Anniversary show, to be coupled with a 300th Programme celebration. But in the event, the unfindable Bernard Palmer was not needed, because George Campey, Head of Publicity, judged that nothing would be gained from such an exercise. Similarly in 1966, Miss Clark announced that the Final of What Do You Know? would also celebrate the 1000th Programme made for the BBC by John P. Wynn. She threw the matter open to all comers. “If you need any further information about Mr Wynn, perhaps you would ring him direct: FINchley 2333.” But seemingly all that came of the plan was the usual “small cocktail party” generally hosted by the Wynns after a Final, if necessary at their own expense.

Without their knowing it, the future of the Wynns’ programme had been in their midst since 1964, when Ian Gillies became Brain of Britain. He was destined also to win the Brain of Brains and the nine-year Top Brain titles, but even at the start of his career as a champion, he was giving evidence of a lively character. It leaps out of the 1964 press release drawn up by the BBC to celebrate his first win, which offers a fine anecdotal insight into the mind of a pure quizzer:

He attributed a bonus mark he earned to the fact that he was listening to the Home Service ‘Today’ programme on the morning of the Final when people in the street were being quizzed [sic] on the Bible. This, he said, set up a train of thought, and asking himself the same afternoon what he knew of the books of the Old Testament – which was the last, for instance? – Mr Gillies visited a reference library to find out. When the very same question turned up a few hours later in What Do You Know?, and Mrs Key failed to give the right answer, Mr Gillies knew.

The difference between Ian Gillies and the rest of us, in 1964 at least, was that the gap in his knowledge bothered him so much that he went to a reference library to find out. That kind of driven curiosity is much harder to spot nowadays, when most of us have the world encyclopaedia of the internet plugged into a handy socket at home. The press release, by the way, annoyingly fails to give us the name of the last book of the Old Testament, as correctly supplied by Mr Gillies. The answer is Malachi.

It was on 11th July 1967 – a year of much change in BBC Radio broadcasting – that the Controller, Light Programme, a name which itself was about to lapse, announced that What Do You Know? was no more:

To H[ead] L[ight] E[ntertainment] copy Miss J. Clark, Ch. Asst. L[ight] P[rogramme].

This is to confirm that I should like the next series to be titled “Brain of Britain 1968”.

Robin Scott.

And so the programme at last shared the name of the title it had been awarding for years. “It seems more indicative of the contest,” Joan Clark explained. With the Light and Home Services gone, and the new numbered networks bedding in, not always comfortably at first, Brain of Britain spent a couple of seasons on Radio Two, but moved over in 1970 to its obvious natural home, Radio Four. In doing so, it joined a company of familiar programmes that represented the BBC’s continuity: Desert Island Discs, The Archers, Woman’s Hour, From Our Own Correspondent, and the other show that occupied much of Franklin Engelmann’s time, Down Your Way.

It was a good moment for the Brain of Britain 1968, Ralph Raby, to attract some publicity by committing himself to a provokingly jocular article called “How To Be A Brain of Britain”:

The first essential is – don’t be too intelligent. Some of my friends at school had such penetrating minds that they were soon buried deep in one subject and lost sight of all others.

Do not waste time seeing a new play or film, or reading a new book – just read a good review to learn the theme and characters.

Thirdly, listen to BBC Radio, which pours out a torrent of information, much of it true. With a transistor set, all your waking hours can be filled with talks on everything from Racine to Racing, until your wife gets tired.

Unfortunately, the readers most likely to take this seriously – especially the part about reading reviews instead of experiencing the work itself – will have been those critics already inclined to believe that the “quiz-world” (which was beginning to emerge as a thing in itself) was the haunt of philistines who knew about things, but never engaged with the deeper truths within.

In February 1970, the 500th edition of the quiz was noted by Joan Clark in a routine memo. It was estimated that her husband had set 30,000 questions since 1953. And then, suddenly, the lady was gone, with one last request, dated 13th May that year:

Thank you for sending me the photographs taken after the Final of Brain of Britain 1970. I return them herewith duly captioned.

As I am retiring from the BBC in two weeks’ time, would you be kind enough to let me have a copy of the group (No. 10A) for my personal retention?

J.C.

She left not only Brain still running, but also Top of the Form, which continued until 1986 – a 38-year career, in which her work as the scorekeeper had incidentally made her voice familiar on the air. John P. Wynn did not retire, but continued to set the questions for Brain, and indeed compiled and copyrighted the 1972 quiz-book Brain of Britain, which appeared under the BBC’s own imprint. The format Wynn chose was strange. The book was divided into nine quizzes, each one with its questions further divided into subject categories – history, geography, people, literature, sport and so on. So, you get a pageful of questions on sport, followed by a pageful on history, and the glorious sense of miscellany and assortment on which the broadcast quiz relies is lost. Even more curiously, one of the nominated sub-categories was “General Knowledge”, as if that were a topic separable from the rest.

A brief introduction was supplied by Joan Clark’s successor in the producer’s chair, John Fawcett Wilson, the most melancholy part of whose task was to pay tribute to Franklin Engelmann. The popular question-master had died suddenly on 2nd March, just one day before he was due to record the 1000th edition of another of his favourites, Gardeners’ Question Time, and a couple of days before his 64th birthday. “His obvious enjoyment of the competition communicated itself to listener and contestant alike,” Wilson wrote.

Since Brain was in mid-run, a replacement for Engelmann was required instantly, and was found in the man who knew most about the quiz, apart from its begetters – the multiple champion Ian Gillies, who chaired the ten or so remaining programmes in the series. Did he feel that he had done enough to take over the job permanently? Some signs emerged later that it was so. Meantime, a letter from Martin Fisher, a future Head of Light Entertainment (Radio), explained the position:

Dear Mr Gillies

I am taking over the Production of Brain of Britain from 1973 from John Fawcett Wilson and I understand from John that you have very kindly agreed to act as an official referee/umpire for the series to whom we can refer on doubtful questions and answers in the programme.

I am sure you will be interested to know that Robert Robinson is taking over the job of Chairman this year.

“Interested” was one way of putting it. But Ian Gillies did indeed go ahead with the adjudicating role, which Fisher himself had previously essayed and found daunting. The series thus took its course, but at the end of it, Gillies in a letter showed signs of lingering disappointment:

Despite my earlier misgivings, I very much enjoyed working on the programme, even with my light hidden under Bob’s bushel, and I am glad if I contributed to the smooth running of the show and helped ease your burden as producer. If the need and opportunity is there for the next series, I shall be pleased to consider playing the same role.

Before 1973 came to an end, there was one definite complaint to be fielded, and unusually, it came from the reigning Brain, A. W. G. (Glyn) Court. Addressing himself to the Controller of Radio Four, with a copy to Martin Fisher, Dr Court noted that six months had gone by since the Finals, leaving him “rather disappointed with the lack of further opportunities arising from them. I had, after all, been led to expect that something of the sort would be provided…” How those expectations were aroused can’t now be established, but it has never been the habit of Brain producers to raise hopes of further employment. Only once, in Richard Edis’s memory, did something happen which might have contented Dr Court, and that was when Geoffrey Colton, Brain of Britain 1993, was flown to the United States to be interviewed on David Letterman’s celebrated TV talk-show – purely because Letterman himself was such a fan of the programme.

Mr and Mrs John P. Wynn, by now, had retired to Skibbereen, in County Cork. Since 1969, the government of the Republic of Ireland had offered various tax exemptions to resident artists, and it appears that through his career in various media, Wynn had successfully established his credentials in that category. It was in Skibbereen that he died, anyway, in 1978 – which could have marked the end of the Wynns’ involvement in the show they had devised and nurtured. But the tenacity of Joan Clark was considerable, and at such a moment, her desire to maintain the connection by taking over John P.’s question-setting role was hard to resist. It turned out not to be her forte. Here we can switch to eye-witness mode, with the arrival of Richard Edis as a producer in the Radio Light Entertainment department (alias the “Comedy Corridor” at 16, Langham Street, W.1). Richard, an old friend and my first producer on Brain, recently told me:

By the time I arrived for the 1979 season, taking over from the double-act of Martin Fisher and Griff Rhys Jones, Ian Gillies was a very unhappy bunny. He was being paid for providing half the questions, but was having to spend inordinate amounts of time re-writing and re-writing Joan’s not-very-good material before compiling the programmes.

It fell to David Hatch, one of the most constructive of all heads of department, to disentangle the situation:

David Hatch persuaded Joan to retire completely from the show and let Ian do the whole lot, while she could just sit back and take the (tax-free) format fees. So, from 1980, Ian was in sole charge, until his final illness in 2002.

By the time that regime-change was sorted out, Ian Gillies and Robert Robinson, however guarded their initial relations, had become the best of friends. In his role as on-stage adjudicator, Gillies had taken the name of “Mycroft” – a one-word solution to the light-under-bushel problem, because of course it signalled that Robinson deferred to his colleague: Mycroft was the name of Sherlock Holmes’s even more gifted elder brother. That latter detail was perfect too, since Gillies was indeed older than Robinson – by ten days. Sherlock once said of Mycroft: “All men are specialists. His specialism is omniscience”, which fitted Gillies well. His voice-of-adjudication was never heard on air, but wasn’t needed. “Mycroft is shaking his head,” Robinson would intone mournfully, and the phrase became famous.

Gillies was very proud of Brain, and regarded his onstage participation in it as a reward for months of slogging over the questions. He used to say that it was one of the very few radio programmes that met Lord Reith’s prescription for BBC Radio: “inform, educate and entertain”. Gillies took an amused view of John P. Wynn’s decades of question-setting, claiming that the pioneer had been obsessed with diseases and other medical calamities. (The quiz, I must say, continues to find ailments a fruitful field of enquiry.) To please his colleagues, Gillies would very occasionally tweak a question to suit their preferences: for example, knowing Richard Edis to be a fanatical supporter of Arsenal F.C., he would insert into every Final a question with some connection, often outrageously distant, to the Gunners. Naturally nobody in the outside world ever noticed.

Edis recalls from that period one particularly remarkable contestant, called Peter Barlow:

Mr Barlow was stunning – well up to the standards of Ian or Kevin [Ashman]. He described himself as a “former diplomat”. (Ian ascertained from him later that he was involved in the Rhodesia independence negotiations.) Unlike a lot of present day “semi-pro” contestants who appear on all the broadcast quiz shows and who just eat encyclopaedias, Peter Barlow was extremely widely read and genuinely knowledgeable about huge amounts of stuff. For the only time in living memory – or mine, at any rate – he remains the only contestant who scored five-in-a-row in each of his first three rounds. So, at the end of round three, along with a couple of bonuses, he’d scored 20-odd, and the others were on two or three. He would have done it again in the next round, but for the fact that he’d never heard of Elton John. Music question – “What is the connection between this piece of music and Watford Football Club?” I can’t now remember which classic we played, but he’d no idea. Which was just as well as Ian was beginning to panic that we’d run out of questions!

Incidentally, that can happen – it did once while I was deputising for Robert Robinson, but fortunately a cache of spares was being carried that day in the programme-box.

When Ian Gillies died, the succession passed naturally to the latest specialist in omniscience, the multi-title winner Kevin Ashman. Bob Robinson was keen to see the “Mycroft” tradition continued with the new question-setter. But after considering the matter – and probably knowing, since he knows so much else, that Bob was a keen reader of Dickens – Ashman suddenly said, one evening at the Paris Theatre in Lower Regent Street, “You know, Bob, our relationship isn’t really Sherlock and Mycroft – it’s much more Spenlow and Jorkins.” In David Copperfield, Spenlow and Jorkins are business partners, but the absent Jorkins’s role is to be referred to by Spenlow as a stickler and nay-sayer. When David asks to be released from an apprenticeship, for example, Spenlow says he wouldn’t object, but that Jorkins would be dead against it. When Robinson had stopped laughing, he agreed that Kevin should be Jorkins ever afterward – and he was, until the day when his celebrity as a contestant/performer took away all his time.

Since then, the overlord of the question-setting process has been the programme’s producer himself, Paul Bajoria. Questions are gathered in from a handful of setters, and it’s a “floating population”, changing from year to year to keep the style fresh. The roster includes writers who provide questions to the other major quizzes of the day, from University Challenge to Round Britain Quiz. Paul says it’s noticeable that among these experts, “great minds think alike” to the extent that the same question will often emerge from two or more of the contracted contributors – which suggests that the setters do respond to the atmospheres of the world around us, even if they seldom produce the kind of dog-licence question Bernard Hollowood once requested. Sadly the well-known BBC economies have meant that nobody now appears on-stage as a consultant and referee in cases where an answer is half-right – the question-setter David Kenrick was the last to do the job – but now, Paul Bajoria and I have to decide such matters between ourselves, in brief and gnomic conversations down the wire between the podium and the technical booth.

Everything seems to continue smoothly, though there are occasional controversies over other matters. The last one to provoke journalistic outrage was the triumph of Barry Simmons in 2012. Some observers felt that since Barry had been a television Egghead (the sixth) since 2008, he was no longer the kind of “civilian” that Brain of Britain should be featuring. Paul Bajoria was called upon to defend the programme’s position, and did so eloquently in a BBC blog: “When we saw that Barry Simmons had applied for Brain of Britain 2013,” he wrote,

we discussed whether he should be allowed to compete, and we realised almost immediately that there’s no sensible reason why not. Barry’s an experienced quiz player who reached the Final of Brain of Britain in 2008 – though, as it happens, he came last. Since then, he has built up his quiz CV to the point where he was invited to apply for, and won, a place on the resident team on BBC2’s Eggheads quiz. Many of his fellow Eggheads are former Brain of Britain or Mastermind champions, or both. Small wonder that, after the requisite five-year gap, Barry was determined to go for the prize! When we offered him a place, we had a conversation to ensure that he realised a poor performance in the programme might harm his reputation. Barry was happy to take the risk, which is a mark of the man. Brain of Britain is no walkover: you get, on average, about twelve utterly unpredictable questions of your own, plus a chance to score bonuses on other people’s if your trigger finger is quick enough. As soon as you get one wrong, your turn ends. Many an accomplished quizzer has crashed and burned.

Barry is still a welcome visitor – in fact he was present for the wine and nibbles after this year’s Final, at the BBC Radio Theatre in April 2017. The Theatre is certainly our most elegant home, but we have others – at BBC Maida Vale, in the studio where Bing Crosby made his last recording, and in Salford, where the programme team is now headquartered.

So how do you become a Brain of Britain? Can it be done simply by memorising things, list by list, from works of reference – I don’t think so. Yes, there are certainly things everyone mugs up on: Kings and Queens of England (and elsewhere), the Periodic Table perhaps, the night sky, the works of some obviously great writers. But there is also a quizzing temperament, and my theory is that it has less to do with remembering things than with being unable to forget anything. It’s almost more like an affliction than a talent – anything that presents itself as a FACT is grabbed by the brain and not allowed to escape. If you’re a sufferer from a cranial overcrowding of that kind, you should probably be having a go at this quiz lark. Remember, there is no more majestic title to aim for than Brain of Britain, and you receive it engraved, as it should be, on a silver salver.