Come December, I often find myself writing a lot of quizzes. Not that I’m complaining: I love writing quizzes, and I really love being paid for writing quizzes. There’s a definite skill in crafting a decent question, and therefore considerable satisfaction in getting it right, tempered only by the unceasing fear of getting it completely wrong. (Like all writing, therefore.)
All of us who toil in the quiz mines are naturally aware that we have our favourite subjects, our home territories if you like. I could go on writing increasingly abstruse questions about cricket or pop music far into the night, but I don’t, because the audience simply isn’t as interested in those subjects as I am. If you are a quizmaster, your job is to entertain people. It’s not to show them that you are much cleverer than they are. They wouldn’t like it, and they might be reluctant to let you leave the building alive.
So where do all these extra quiz questions go? Most of mine just clog up my head, until an outlet presents itself. The other day I met Philip Norman, the esteemed biographer of Beatles and Stones, and within seconds we were both trying to think of as many songs as we could whose titles are not mentioned in the lyrics. There’s obviously ‘Space Oddity’, and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, and ‘Unchained Melody’ (which was the theme to a film called Unchained), and ‘Blue Monday’, and ‘Annie’s Song’, and ‘Song 2’, and ‘Positively 4th Street’, and ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’, and ‘A Day in the Life’, and ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, which reminds me now of another of my favourite questions. According to Marianne Faithfull, who had given him the book, Mick Jagger wrote ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ immediately after reading which Russian novel? Answer at the end of the column.
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