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,
