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Gillies

      I am taking over the Production of Brain of Britain from 1973 from John Fawcett Wilson and I understand from John that you have very kindly agreed to act as an official referee/umpire for the series to whom we can refer on doubtful questions and answers in the programme.

      I am sure you will be interested to know that Robert Robinson is taking over the job of Chairman this year.

      “Interested” was one way of putting it. But Ian Gillies did indeed go ahead with the adjudicating role, which Fisher himself had previously essayed and found daunting. The series thus took its course, but at the end of it, Gillies in a letter showed signs of lingering disappointment:

      Despite my earlier misgivings, I very much enjoyed working on the programme, even with my light hidden under Bob’s bushel, and I am glad if I contributed to the smooth running of the show and helped ease your burden as producer. If the need and opportunity is there for the next series, I shall be pleased to consider playing the same role.

      Before 1973 came to an end, there was one definite complaint to be fielded, and unusually, it came from the reigning Brain, A. W. G. (Glyn) Court. Addressing himself to the Controller of Radio Four, with a copy to Martin Fisher, Dr Court noted that six months had gone by since the Finals, leaving him “rather disappointed with the lack of further opportunities arising from them. I had, after all, been led to expect that something of the sort would be provided…” How those expectations were aroused can’t now be established, but it has never been the habit of Brain producers to raise hopes of further employment. Only once, in Richard Edis’s memory, did something happen which might have contented Dr Court, and that was when Geoffrey Colton, Brain of Britain 1993, was flown to the United States to be interviewed on David Letterman’s celebrated TV talk-show – purely because Letterman himself was such a fan of the programme.

      Mr and Mrs John P. Wynn, by now, had retired to Skibbereen, in County Cork. Since 1969, the government of the Republic of Ireland had offered various tax exemptions to resident artists, and it appears that through his career in various media, Wynn had successfully established his credentials in that category. It was in Skibbereen that he died, anyway, in 1978 – which could have marked the end of the Wynns’ involvement in the show they had devised and nurtured. But the tenacity of Joan Clark was considerable, and at such a moment, her desire to maintain the connection by taking over John P.’s question-setting role was hard to resist. It turned out not to be her forte. Here we can switch to eye-witness mode, with the arrival of Richard Edis as a producer in the Radio Light Entertainment department (alias the “Comedy Corridor” at 16, Langham Street, W.1). Richard, an old friend and my first producer on Brain, recently told me:

      By the time I arrived for the 1979 season, taking over from the double-act of Martin Fisher and Griff Rhys Jones, Ian Gillies was a very unhappy bunny. He was being paid for providing half the questions, but was having to spend inordinate amounts of time re-writing and re-writing Joan’s not-very-good material before compiling the programmes.

      It fell to David Hatch, one of the most constructive of all heads of department, to disentangle the situation:

      David Hatch persuaded Joan to retire completely from the show and let Ian do the whole lot, while she could just sit back and take the (tax-free) format fees. So, from 1980, Ian was in sole charge, until his final illness in 2002.

      By the time that regime-change was sorted out, Ian Gillies and Robert Robinson, however guarded their initial relations, had become the best of friends. In his role as on-stage adjudicator, Gillies had taken the name of “Mycroft” – a one-word solution to the light-under-bushel problem, because of course it signalled that Robinson deferred to his colleague: Mycroft was the name of Sherlock Holmes’s even more gifted elder brother. That latter detail was perfect too, since Gillies was indeed older than Robinson – by ten days. Sherlock once said of Mycroft: “All men are specialists. His specialism is omniscience”, which fitted Gillies well. His voice-of-adjudication was never heard on air, but wasn’t needed. “Mycroft is shaking his head,” Robinson would intone mournfully, and the phrase became famous.

      Gillies was very proud of Brain, and regarded his onstage participation in it as a reward for months of slogging over the questions. He used to say that it was one of the very few radio programmes that met Lord Reith’s prescription for BBC Radio: “inform, educate and entertain”. Gillies took an amused view of John P. Wynn’s decades of question-setting, claiming that the pioneer had been obsessed with diseases and other medical calamities. (The quiz, I must say, continues to find ailments a fruitful field of enquiry.) To please his colleagues, Gillies would very occasionally tweak a question to suit their preferences: for example, knowing Richard Edis to be a fanatical supporter of Arsenal F.C., he would insert into every Final a question with some connection, often outrageously distant, to the Gunners. Naturally nobody in the outside world ever noticed.

      Edis recalls from that period one particularly remarkable contestant, called Peter Barlow:

      Mr Barlow was stunning – well up to the standards of Ian or Kevin [Ashman]. He described himself as a “former diplomat”. (Ian ascertained from him later that he was involved in the Rhodesia independence negotiations.) Unlike a lot of present day “semi-pro” contestants who appear on all the broadcast quiz shows and who just eat encyclopaedias, Peter Barlow was extremely widely read and genuinely knowledgeable about huge amounts of stuff. For the only time in living memory – or mine, at any rate – he remains the only contestant who scored five-in-a-row in each of his first three rounds. So, at the end of round three, along with a couple of bonuses, he’d scored 20-odd, and the others were on two or three. He would have done it again in the next round, but for the fact that he’d never heard of Elton John. Music question – “What is the connection between this piece of music and Watford Football Club?” I can’t now remember which classic we played, but he’d no idea. Which was just as well as Ian was beginning to panic that we’d run out of questions!

      Incidentally, that can happen – it did once while I was deputising for Robert Robinson, but fortunately a cache of spares was being carried that day in the programme-box.

      When Ian Gillies died, the succession passed naturally to the latest specialist in omniscience, the multi-title winner Kevin Ashman. Bob Robinson was keen to see the “Mycroft” tradition continued with the new question-setter. But after considering the matter – and probably knowing, since he knows so much else, that Bob was a keen reader of Dickens – Ashman suddenly said, one evening at the Paris Theatre in Lower Regent Street, “You know, Bob, our relationship isn’t really Sherlock and Mycroft – it’s much more Spenlow and Jorkins.” In David Copperfield, Spenlow and Jorkins are business partners, but the absent Jorkins’s role is to be referred to by Spenlow as a stickler and nay-sayer. When David asks to be released from an apprenticeship, for example, Spenlow says he wouldn’t object, but that Jorkins would be dead against it. When Robinson had stopped laughing, he agreed that Kevin should be Jorkins ever afterward – and he was, until the day when his celebrity as a contestant/performer took away all his time.

      Since then, the overlord of the question-setting process has been the programme’s producer himself, Paul Bajoria. Questions are gathered in from a handful of setters, and it’s a “floating population”, changing from year to year to keep the style fresh. The roster includes writers who provide questions to the other major quizzes of the day, from University Challenge to Round Britain Quiz. Paul says it’s noticeable that among these experts, “great minds think alike” to the extent that the same question will often emerge from two or more of the contracted contributors – which suggests that the setters do respond to the atmospheres of the world around us, even if they seldom produce the kind of dog-licence question Bernard Hollowood once requested. Sadly the well-known BBC economies have meant that nobody now appears on-stage as a consultant and referee in cases where an answer is half-right – the question-setter David Kenrick was the last to do the job – but now, Paul Bajoria and I have to decide such matters between ourselves, in brief and gnomic conversations down the wire between the podium and the technical booth.

      Everything seems to continue smoothly, though there are occasional controversies over other

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