Round Britain Quiz

Yes, the quiz was when it was international - which made the idea funnier: satellite links just to exchange banalities. I deeply regret that I came to Round Britain Quiz late in life; since then I can testify that devising suitably fiendish questions with a companion really helps alleviate the boredom of holidaying in the lake district [or substitute one's own purgatory].

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Has (dread thought! as Craig Brown would say) Round Britain Quiz dumbed down in recent series? Some of the questions have seemed insultingly easy. Maybe it'll be renamed The People's Quiz, with Griff Rhys-Jones in the chair...

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Short answer: no.

Or is it a rites of passage thing? Could it be you start off thinking "Wow, I'll never be able to compete with these intellectual giants," but then as you acquire more knowledge without conscious effort over time then similarly pitched questions seem ridiculously easy?

Short answer to the above: no. It is not like that. The questions are easier.

Except when I don't get them then they are unreasonably difficult. Hope this helps.

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How about creating a spinoff channel called BBC VII, only accessible, through some sort of complicated code, to those who studied Latin at school? It could be wall to wall repeats of old RBQs - but isn't it horrible even calling it RBQ? Like one of those horrific cinema snacks they used to entice us to eat with the slogan: "An hour from now you'll wish you had one."

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DrFeatherweight,

"I find it reassuring that there were/are pointlessly intellectual people around - thank heavens for pointless intellect, with absolutely no vocational application at all."

May I point you towards a weekly column in the Guardian called Notes and Queries? Or indeed this messageboard...

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Yes, I understand a Robert Redford film about this very matter is in production as we speak. I believe the line, "Say it ain't so, John Julius!" features in the script.

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findarticles.com/p/a...

Have a look at this article about RBQ. It makes the point that the pop culture questions in a sense are harder for those brought up in a certain way as they can't be predicted:

"Nods to popular culture have brought inevitable cries of dumbing down but if anything they makes the quiz even more troublesome. Earlier RBQ generations may have been more immersed in high art and classical languages, but at least they knew at what level the questions would be pitched. Today's subjects are incredibly eclectic and it is much easier for teams to go off at a tangent only to be informed that they're up a cul-de-sac. There is nothing more humbling than being told that a question has more to do with Posh Spice than Shakespeare."

Humbling or ennobling?

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Forget Fiennes - if you want a taxi driver it's gotta be De Niro. ("Are you lookin' at my question? I said, are you lookin' at my question?")

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Anybody hear Midweek this week? Guess who was on it - John Julius Norwich!!! Only heard beginning and end during my commute but he was asked to show his tatoos at one point and also asked whether he'd ever done anything outrageous. This is a man who sends a commonplace book annually to his friends - he's too busy scanning the writings of Jeremy Taylor to have time for anything else!

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A selection of the commonplace collections he sent annually to friends was issued under the title Christmas Crackers - very good for dipping into.

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Talking of whom, Round Britain Quiz is back tonight (Sat) on Radio 4 at 11pm - John Julius Norwich is unlikely to be a participant but it'll be a good opportunity to assess whether it has indeed become dumbed down.

You can test yourself as R4 prints the questions in advance here:

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4...

And relating to earlier message, if John Julius has tattoos (which I can't quite believe) what would they be of? Now that's the kind of question RBQ ought to be asking...

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Ah... so if you listen to the first broadcast then you need to record it and pause periodically or have a pause facility in order to ruminate. Or maybe the broadcast ought to be say forty five minutes with lots of radio silence.

Have to admit when I saw the questions on the R4 website I tried some of them beforehand; what with being on the net already it was tempting to google a few things. I felt ashamed afterwards. Not half the fun. I could feel some astral version of John Julius waving a reprimanding digit - tattooed of course.

As to whether questions are easier, it certainly seemed so - though the team's lack of familiarity with Ebony and Ivory, which surely presented the answer to them with a big red ribbon, may be something to envy rather than mock. Suppose the answer is always: the questions you know are easier; the ones you don't are unreasonably difficult.

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Ting Ting? Early Abba song, surely?