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
