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
