Roundabout
TERRIFIED AND EAGER as candidates waiting for interview, the contest- ants for the television quiz show waited behind scenes; they sat in a row on hard chairs while techni- cians trod over their feet, the light from the liercely-lit stage reflected on their anxious faces. There was a dark schoolboy (mental arithmetic), a pretty hairdresser in a tight skirt (films), the oldest married couple in the audience, and a gay old girl with hardly any teeth who was to try the questions on animals. All had volun- teered for the game. Now they wished they hadn't.
With them, concentrated and withdrawn, sat two experts, both of whom had applied years before to be on the show : one was just beginning, one just ending a quest for £1,000. With them, also, were a grey squirrel, a badger, and Hughic Green's bushbaby in a plastic hatbox.
'Quiet everyone,' said a voice, and everyone obeyed except the badger, who yeepcd and moaned plaintively in his keeper's arms. 'Gawd, I thought it was me,' whispered one of the women. '1 could do with a Scotch, I could.'
The first to go was the game old girl : the six leant eagerly towards the monitor set and watched with trembling admiration as she cheeked the compere, won LI 6 and gave the studio audience a high-kick view of her bloomers ('That's why we telerecord it,' said Hughie Green grimly. 'On a live programme I'd have had to shut her up just in case). She and the squirrel arrived back in the wings simultaneously, the squirrel with agitated claws sunk deep in the peach shoulder of a studio lovely. 'Get this thing off me!' hissed the girl, and floated back into camera with a silken smile.
The stage darkened, a single spotlight only re- maining; the expert on horse-racing stood up, moistened his lips and went on, to a roll of drums and a flurry of good wishes. In a few minutes the lights went up again, and he was back : without his thousand pounds. The old girl went up and patted his cheek; the compere came out and sor- rowfully shook his hand; everyone murmured in sympathy.
'I wouldn't have minded,' he whispered, 'if I thought it was a fair question. But there isn't a racing man in England who could have answered that, I don't care who he is.' A retired taxi-driver, he had for some years been working on a racing manual; his consolation was the publicity his appearance might bring to the book. 'We get the Eucvt•lupmrlia Britannic-a to set the questions,' said a Programme assistant. 'No one can accuse us of being unfair.'
The compere came out and stood meekly while two girls in pink combed his hair and powdered his face. The pretty girl went on and won f8--- got scared when they started asking „me the authors,' she said. 'How would I know who wrote the book of the film The Old Man and the Sea?' The boy, too, called it a deal at £8--'Now I can get my watch back from the menders'—but he was soon nervous again. Father, out in the audience, would want to know why he had, not tried for more. The forty-three-years-married couple put up a good show but helped each other off at £16. 'I was getting nervous and it was too hot anyway,' said the woman. 'And my head aches, and my legs ache—oh, awful, just awful: The second expert, an ex-Shakespearean actor whose appearance and delivery suggested an ostrich who had swallowed a bass drum, went on and won £240 with no change of expression what- ever; and the programme was finished. The com- pere wrote autographs for seventeen middle-aged ladies, the ostrich carefully changed a threepenny bit and went off to telephone his wife, and the bushbaby was carried home to its supper.
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