Lillian Crawford Article 29th August

I missed this article earlier in the week. If you haven’t read it, you might find it interesting. University Challenge, Brain of Britain, Counterpoint and Mastermind contender, Lillian Crawford has written an interesting piece which appeared in the Guardian on Monday, and it’s well worth casting an eye over.

Lillian Crawford Article Guardian 29th August

Lillian discusses her reasons for going on these quiz shows – “to reinforce the importance of including more women within the cultural canon by greeting them with a cheery and confident correct answer, rather than a dismissive “pass”. Now, come on, that is interesting. It’s a perfectly valid reason, and rather puts my ‘I like quizzes and I was big headed enough to think I could win.’ to shame. Even with my specialists on Mastermind, I picked what I was interested in, what I already had books about, and in all bar one of them I picked what I thought was learnable within the timescale.

Lilliam recently worked as a researcher on University Challenge, producing a significant number of music and picture rounds – and I would think that is a position which gives you more of a say in what is included in the cultural canon than being a contestant.

Lillian goes on to say “Competing on University Challenge made me realise that I quiz not to perform knowledge, but to acquire it.” This again forces me to look myself squarely in the eye, and if I’m honest, I can’t say that I’ve played in so many quizzes over the years mainly because of what I will learn when I do it. Without doubt I have learned a huge amount from quizzing over the years. I still say that becoming a regular question master in the rugby club from 1995 onwards was when I started to become a good quizzer, and one of the main reasons why I was able to win in 2007. I found learning all of my Mastermind subjects to be tremendously interesting and enjoyable. But at the end of the day, if I’m honest I guess I’d say that for me the first thing about a quiz is showing off what I know, and dredging up the all-important answer from the dump-bin of memory. Yeah, not coming across very well here, am I?

I’m interested to see Lillian say of her 2021 appearance on Mastermind “Before appearing on the show contestants choose five subjects to prepare. . . “ In my day, you put 4 on the online application form, and then if you were lucky you’d whittle these down to three in your audition. If you were unlucky you’d need to come up with 3 replacements, which happened in my first audition. But even then, you wouldn’t prepare all of them in one go. There’s no sense in preparing your second subject until you’ve won your heat, for example.

Lillian makes the point that the questions she was asked about Sylvia Plath were mostly superficial merely calling for the retainment of facts. Well, that is kind of the name of the game on “Mastermind”, in fact the majority of quiz shows, I would argue. The savoir often is more important than the connaitre, to use an analogy which I think may have been made by Nancy Wilkinson, first Mastermind champion in 1972.

Lillian goes on to explain how she has given up on quizzes but explains how creating questions has proven to be more fulfilling. That’s fair enough, and as I said earlier, by crafting the questions you’re in a much better position to exert some influence over what becomes part of the canon of quizzing and what stays outside. As we often say, you can only answer what you’re asked.

One thing Lillian says is, “Quizzing isn’t just about getting the right answer”. No, I agree that it isn’t, but trying to get the right answer is the main point. She continues, “I hope that when someone hears a song or sees a painting they like on University Challenge they will investigate the artists further, and I believe many do.” Well, funnily enough during the last series one of the questions referred to Dan Simmons’ “Hyperion”. I knew nothing about the novel but was so taken by the few words spoken about it that I bought it, and absolutely loved it and the sequels.

I’m not going to argue with Lillian’s final words “So pay attention to those starters for 10 – if you don’t already know the answer you might learn something new.” Agreed, although even though I do pay attention there are some things which I don’t know, and when they come up again a few years later I still don’t know them.

As I said, I find it an interesting and thought-provoking piece, although it would have been nice to see Lillian express just what she thinks about people who quiz just for the sake of the game, because they enjoy doing it. I mean, let’s be honest, if you don’t enjoy actually playing in quizzes, then there are better ways of acquiring knowledge, and I don’t know but I would imagine there are better or easier ways of popularising specific areas of knowledge.