Another voice

The Quiz game

Auberon Waugh

I can understand how mince pies and turkeys and crystallised fruit became associated with Christmas, even tangerines and crackers. At some distant and deprived moment in our history, these things must have been considered treats. All the high spots of the liturgical year have gastronomic accompaniments: Hot Cross Buns on Good Friday, milk lamb or sucking pig at Easter, when the poor eat chocolate eggs and do terrible damage to their surviving teeth. Devout families could probably eat their way through the whole canon : roast hedgehog to celebrate the martyrdom of St Joan; canard a la presse to commemorate St Margaret Clitheroe who was squashed to death under a weighted door by the Reformers in 1586; barbecued rump for St Lawrence; salade de tete for the many martyrs who lost their heads; and endless helpings of offal to remind us of those hanged, drawn and quartered by their separated brethren in penal times.

But I have never been able to understand why the Birth of our Saviour should be celebrated by Christmas Quizzes. There is nothing in scripture or in the tradition of the early church to support it. Possibly Jesus's early visit to the Temple, when he astounded the high priests with his intellectual dexterity and general knowledge, causing much distress to his poor mother, might provide an occasion for all our bores, pedants and polymaths to have a field day. But there is nothing whatever in the story of the Nativity to justify such behaviour and it seems to turn the whole event into one of those modern pantomimes which are little more than variety shows, like a Jack and the Beanstalk I saw recently in Bristol which was largely taken up with a gymnastic display by professional athletes.

Or perhaps the tradition is a hangover from pagan times. I can well imagine our two high priests of the cult, Brandreth* and Bookert dressed in druidical robes and waving little pieces of mistletoe around as they ask some damn fool question about the angles of the sun, standing high and proud on a woodhenge or long barrow in prehistoric Neasdcn.

The urge to feel superior in this way is obviously as old as the Sphinx. Probably it Is less anti-social than the political power urge which is the cause of most misery in the world, but it is worrying, nevertheless, and seems to call for compassionate study. Not long ago, I heard someone at a dinner party * Pears Family Quiz Book Gyles Brandreth (Pelham £2.95) t The Booker Quiz Christopher Booker (BBC/Routledge £1.50) ask the young lady next to him if she knew how many chemical elements there were. When she disclaimed any such knowledge, he proceeded to list them for her benefit, one by one.

At the time I thought it an odd way to ingratiate oneself with a pretty woman, but musing about it afterwards I decided it was a bid to win her admiration on the peacock principle of displaying superior knowledge. My point in telling this story is to isolate what I think may be an element in the urge to set quizzes. But the important difference is that the quiz-setter never sees the lovely, puzzled face of his victim as she frowns into the candlelight and wonders how on earth she can get away from this frightful bore. He can only imagine the consternation he causes, the gasps of admiration at his own cleverness to think of such ludicrously difficult questions.

Musing thus, I began to remember everything I knew about Booker to see if it would provide a clue. When I first met him in I964—on a croquet lawn in Oxfordshire— he was still a comparatively young man.

I don't know what he was doing there and have not discovered since. If I had known that his mother was headmistress of a famous girls' school I might have shown more interest in him, but as it was I concentrated on my game and, as I remember, thrashed him soundly. In retrospect, this may have been the wrong approach but it is easy to be wise after the event. The next time I met him was three years later, in 1967, when I had just been appointed Political Correspondent of the Spectator and was winning much (no doubt undeserved) praise for the boldness and novelty of my jokes. Again, Booker had this curious, Giocondalike smile playing about his lips as he told me that he had been offered the same job but had declined it, presumably because of the greater purity of his political ideas.

I recognised the smile at once. It was the smile of a Cambridge man scoring a point.

I offer these reminiscences as a partial explanation for the person who now triumphantly emerges as one of the great Christmas quiz-setters of his generation. Let us examine his latest offering: 'Question 45. Pairs.

'Here are the names of twenty assorted English writers. In fact they are not quite so loosely assorted as they may seem—for in fact they divide into ten pairs, each pair being linked by something in common : Daphne du Maurier Jane Austen D. H. Lawrence Charlotte Bronte T. E. Lawrence Arnold Bennett Ronald Blythe William Cowper Dr Samuel Johnson George Crabbe A. E. Housman Thomas Hardy James Herriot Matthew Arnold Gilbert White John Betjeman Flora Thompson Mary Webb Benjamin Disraeli Lord Byron 'A clue: Arthur Mee might help you.'

I suppose he might. Now let me see.

Matthew Arnold and Arnold Bennett obviously go together, having Arnold in common. Benjamin sounds rather like Betjeman, and both men are of foreign extraction. Daphne du Maurier and Jane Austen are lady novelists, that's easy. James Herriot and Dr Johnson are both medical men, and have that in common. I would be tempting to put the two Lawrences together on the grounds that they have the same name, but it seems too obvious and 1 suspect a trick. Ronald Blythe, I rather fancy, is film critic of the Observer, or something like that, so he probably goes with whichever Lawrence it was who made that ghastly, interminable film about camels in the desert, played by Peter O'Toole.

What fun. Isn't Christopher clever ? Much cleverer than Gyles Brandreth, although one has to admit that Brandreth is even more fun : 'How was Baron Passfield better known ? Was it as : a. Charlie Chaplin ?

b. Sidney Webb?

c. Charles Dickens?

d. Harold Macmillan ?'

'When was Napoleon defeated at Waterloo ? Was it in :

1066?

1644?

1804?

1815?'

Now that's what I call a real brainteaser. But then Gyles Brandreth went to Oxford, and probably doesn't have Christopher's problems.

Two mistakes in Booker's quiz may offer an important clue, where he asks us who wrote the Dairy (sic) of a Genius and gives Dairy (sic) of a Nobody as one of his answers. To make this mistake once is understandable, to make it twice surely indicates an underlying anxiety about milk which must go some way to explaining something or other. At very least, it indicates an uncertainty, and it is uncertainty we must search for in trying to explain this dreadful compulsion to ask questions to which the inquirer already knows all the answers.

But at Christmas, we must be humble and join in other people's little games. As the trick questions come tumbling out one after another, as we stumble and murmur our idiotic suggestions, half-stupefied with drink and sticky food, we must think of that little smile playing about the lips of the quiz-setters. Dear Christopher, dear Gyles, I hope you have a very happy Christmas.