The Price is right but the Brice certainly isn't

How are we doing? Me? Well, I’ll be all the better this time next week after the school year has finished, but no, fair’s fair, I’m doing pretty well, all thing’s considered.

I haven’t much to tell you if I’m totally honest. Let’s start with a reminder that University Challenge: The Next Generation starts tomorrow with Amol Rajan in the QM’s chair. The I just want to mention something that happened at the club on Thursday. It’s the rare occurrence when the question master confuses two things, one with the other, in the question itself. One memorable example of this was quite a few years ago when one of our less popular question masters of the time asked –

“Which British actor won a Best Supporting Actor for his role in Spartacus?” The answer he gave was Hugh Griffith. The wrong answer he gave, I should say. As you probably know, Hugh Griffith won his Oscar for his role in another epic toga opera, Ben Hur. What made it worse, though, was that a British actor DID winn best supporting actor for Spartacus, but it was Peter Ustinov.

Let’s come back to last Thursday then. The QM asked the question – “In which work of fiction was Fanny Brice the name of the main protagonist – and for a bonus point, tell me the name of the author.” Well, the thing is, that Fanny BRICE is the name of Barbara Streisand’s character in the movies Funny Girl and Funny Lady – and although some of the events portrayed may have been fictionalised to some extent, Fanny BRICE was very much a real person. Then it struck me. He must mean Fanny PRICE, in which case the answer was Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. I’m always at a bit of a dilemma when I notice things like this. Believe it or not there are times when I do keep my gob shut about things like this. On other occasions I have learned not to shout at the QM, but to have a quiet word. For example, when the same QM asked “What is the connection between Thomas the Tank Engine and Libya?” I went up to him and quietly told him that IF the connection was Idris, then it wasn’t Thomas the Tank Engine, but Ivor the Engine. Realisation dawned, and he announced the correction to the question to all. Why did I tell him on that one and not on other errors? Well, because the misdirection to Thomas the Tank Engine made the question almost impossible to answer, so it struck me as the fairest thing to do.

Which is all a long winded way of saying that I did alert the QM to the error. For all I know all of the other teams had worked out the QM’s mistake already. Maybe some of them had and not others. Maybe none of them had. But it just seemed the right thing to do at that point.

I’m not trying to have a moan about the question master here. Everyone of us who has ever set a quiz on a regular or semi-regular basis has made mistakes with it. Yes, gentle reader, even me. What’s more, one of mine actually went down in print! In one of my quiz books on the Kindle I asked the question – Which singer was nicknamed the Velvet Frog? – Apologies to Mel Torme for that one – he was of course nicknamed the Velvet Fog!