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
