Jackpot
Who shot Martin Luther King?
Quiz 89
Round 1: Pot Luck
- Who had a sword called Excalibur?
- Which British politician became known as ‘the Quiet Man’?
- Who were the first European winners of football’s World Cup?
- Napoleon’s favourite horse was named after which of his great victories?
- Which state most recently became part of the USA?
- What is a campanile?
- What awards are presented annually for outstanding contributions to British film and television in imitation of Oscars in the USA?
- Where would you find a glass pyramid designed by the architect Ieoh Meng Pei?
- Which British footballer was the first to earn £100 a week?
- Which part was played by Tyne Daly in the US television series
Cagney and Lacey
?
Round 2: Fabulous Firsts
- Which was the first single to sell a million copies?
- The first recorded use of the word ‘baseball’ is in Jane Austen’s
Northanger Abbey
– true or false?
- What kind of international competition was first held in Folkestone in August 1908?
- Which sport was the first to have an official world championship (first held in 1873)?
- Which football club won the first FA Cup competition following World War II?
- Who promised to build ‘a country fit for heroes’ at the end of World War I?
- In which year did Rowntree’s Fruit Gums first go on sale – 1893, 1903 or 1913?
- On 11 June 1953, which famous cricketer became the first professional player to captain England?
- How did the Countess Constance Markievicz make political history in 1918?
- Which author is usually identified as the first to use a typewriter?
Half-time teaser
Dutchman Niek Vermeulen holds the record for the world’s largest collection of airline sick bags – how many does he have?
Round 3: Numbers
- No number between one and 99 contains the letter A – true or false?
- Which number in the National Lottery is chosen less often than any other?
- In George Orwell’s novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, what is the name of the room in which people are tortured by their greatest fear?
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- In Roman numerals, which number is represented by the letter M?
- How many Horsemen of the Apocalypse are there?
- In
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
, what is the answer to the question ‘what is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?’
- What was US murderer John Dillinger known as?
- By what number do members of the Royal Navy refer to their working dress?
- What number refers to an ice-cream with a chocolate flake stuck in it?
- According to the Bible, what is the Number of the Beast?
Round 4: Pot Luck
- Which Charles Dickens character is always expecting something to turn up?
- For what television programme was ‘This wheel’s on fire’ the theme tune?
- What style of jazz erupted in New York after World War II in the hands of such exponents as Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie and Miles Davis?
- Which is ‘probably the best lager in the world’?
- What are the Port of Liverpool Building, the Royal Liver Exchange Building and the Cunard Building in Liverpool collectively known as?
- Which treaty formally ended World War I?
- Which war did Muhammad Ali refuse to fight in?
- According to a recent survey, what is the average Briton’s favourite smell?
- Which prime minister was accused of ignoring reality in the
Sun
headline ‘Crisis? What crisis?’?
- Which is the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world?
Jackpot
Which location in Essex became notorious in the 1930s as ‘the most haunted place in Britain’?
Quiz 90
Round 1: Pot Luck
- Which is the only country that occupies an entire continent?
- What is a hydrophobic afraid of?
- Which major US sporting event has been held every January since 1967?
- Who led the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s in the USA?
- What stage name did pianist Wladziu Valentino adopt?
- What is a buttress – a folding chair, a supporting structure in buildings or a tight-fitting dress?
- What gender are worker ants?
- Which queen ruled first – Elizabeth I or Mary I?
- In which country did violence erupt between Tutsis and Hutus in 1994?
- How does an operetta differ from an opera?
Round 2: Names
- Sean is an Irish equivalent of which first name?
- In British place names, what does ‘Chipping’ mean?
- By what name are the ports of Dover, Hastings, Hythe, Romney and Sandwich collectively known?
- Which English city had the Roman name Aquae Sulis?
- What, according to a survey of 2005, overtook the Red Lion as the most common pub name in Britain?
- What was the name of the film company co-founded by George Harrison?
- What colour name did Harvey Keitel have in the 1991 film
Reservoir Dogs
?
- What is the first name of footballer Nobby Stiles?
- By what name is Kampuchea now known?
- In the Jeeves and Wooster stories of P. G. Wodehouse, what is Jeeves’s first name?
Half-time teaser
Tomas Lundman holds the record for heading a football continuously without dropping it – how long did he manage to keep going?
Round 3: Entertainment
- What was Mickey Mouse’s dog called?
- Whose hits included ‘Endless love’ and ‘Touch me in the morning’?
- Which Hollywood hunk was the first man to appear on the cover of
Vogue
?
- Which popular novel includes among its main characters the sisters Amy, Beth, Jo and Meg?
- From which play comes the line ‘Brazil, where the nuts come from’?
- In which country was US songwriter Irving Berlin born?
- Which of Gilbert and Sullivan wrote the music?
- Alongside the Lyttelton and the Cottesloe, what is the Royal National Theatre’s third stage?
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- Which role was played in the cinema by Michael Caine in 1966, by Alan Price in 1975 and by Jude Law in 2004?
- From which musical does ‘You’ll never walk alone’ come?
Round 4: Pot Luck
- Lack of which hormone causes diabetes?
- How did the Getty family make their fortune?
- Which 14-year-old famously got himself into trouble for ordering a cherry brandy?
- Which language is spoken most widely in Chile?
- What does the Great Barrier Reef consist of?
- Who was the first Frenchman to win the Formula One championship?
- What is measured with a theodolite?
- By what other name are althaea plants popularly known?
- To what did the Test and County Cricket Board (TCCB) change its name in 1996?
- In which sport might you ‘catch a crab’?
Jackpot
In the 2002 BBC poll of the Greatest Britons of all time, Winston Churchill came top – who came second?
Quiz 91
Round 1: Pot Luck
- What is the name of the lion in the Narnia books of C. S. Lewis?
- In which long-running series are David, Ruth and Eddie central characters?
- Who won three consecutive Wimbledon men’s singles titles in the years 1934 to 1936?
- What was the name of the pop group of which Boy George was frontman?
- In which film did Katy Johnson play a little old lady who unwittingly plays host to a desperate gang of robbers led by Alec Guinness?
- Which Iraqi city stands on the Shatt al-Arab waterway?
- What is the name of Postman Pat’s cat?
- Which international pressure group has as its symbol a candle wrapped in barbed wire?
- In what manner was the English Channel swum for the first time in 1962?
- What is the name of the Gaulish Druid in the adventures of Asterix?
Round 2: Modern Art
- What purpose did the building in which the Tate Modern art gallery is housed originally serve?
- What is the name of the giant Antony Gormley statue in Gateshead?
- What is the name given to a work of art in which the picture is built up wholly or partly using pieces of paper, cloth or other material stuck to a canvas or other backing?
- Which artist painted the double portrait
Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy
?
- Which famous art collector lost much of his collection in a disastrous fire in May 2004?
- Which British artist provided a coloured pattern to be used as a test card for cameras on board the space probe
Beagle 2
in 2003?
- Who included among his masterpieces the 1944 painting
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
?
- Which sculptor provided a statue of St Michael to be mounted on the new Coventry Cathedral in 1958?
- Which controversial US artist was popularly dubbed Jack the Dripper?
- Which New York art gallery designed by Frank Lloyd Wright was opened in 1959?
Half-time teaser
David Morgan of Burford has the world’s largest collection of traffic cones – how many different cones does he have?
Round 3: Whiter than White
- Who had a number one hit in the UK in 1967 with ‘A whiter shade of pale’?
- What is a WASP?
- How is Maurice Micklewhite better known?
- Which king is the subject of T. H. White’s book
The Once and Future King
?
- Which English naturalist wrote
The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne
?
- By what name did Priscilla White become famous?
- What was the name of the ship in which the heir of Henry I drowned in 1120?
- Which snooker player has been (to date) runner-up in the World Championship no less than six times?
- Which soul singer noted for his deep, gravelly voice died in 2003?
- From which pop song comes the line ‘some man comes on and tells me how white my shirts could be but he can’t be a man ’cos he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me’?
Round 4: Pot Luck
- What is the name of the world’s second-highest mountain?
- Who invented dynamite?
91
- What do the initials AWAC stand for?
- What is the name of the monument to the dead of the two world wars that stands in Whitehall, London?
- Who played Terry, a former boxer, in the 1954 film
On the Waterfront
?
- Who was known as Satchmo?
- The Mansion House in London is the official residence of whom?
- Who had trouble getting past Sylvia’s mother in 1972?
- Who fought Muhammad Ali in the 1975 boxing match known as the Thriller in Manila?
- Which hymn has been sung at FA Cup finals since 1927?
Jackpot
In which film did Sidney Poitier play a character called Virgil Tibbs?
Quiz 92
Round 1: Pot Luck
- Coffee contains which stimulant?
- Which state is ruled by members of the Grimaldi family?
- What are the doldrums?
- In the heptathlon, which event is contested first?
- In the comic stories of Giovanni Guareschi, what is the job of Don Camillo?
- What is a male swan called?
- Who killed David Blakely?
- How old was F. Scott Fitzgerald when he died – 44, 54 or 64?
- In which sport do teams contest the Canada Cup?
- Which youth organisation originally called its members ‘Rosebuds’?
Round 2: Crime
- Which presenter of television’s
Crimewatch
became herself the subject of a crime featured on the programme in 1999?
- Where did Sherlock Holmes and his arch-enemy Moriarty apparently fall to their deaths?
- Who played the younger Vito Corleone in
The Godfather
series?
- What name is given to a housebreaker who uses natural agility to gain entry to a building via a roof, window, chimney, etc.?
- In the murder mystery by Dorothy L. Sayers, what are the Nine Tailors?
- What was the name of the actor who assassinated Abraham Lincoln?
- With which sensational crime was Ronnie Biggs intimately associated in 1963?
- In which novel does Raskolnikov murder a much-hated pawnbroker?
- Who played crime boss Tony Soprano in television’s
The Sopranos
?
- Who shot the sheriff in 1973?
Half-time teaser
In 2004, Edit Berces established a new world women’s record for the distance travelled on a treadmill – how many miles did she cover?
Round 3: The 1940s
- Who briefly succeeded Adolf Hitler as leader of Nazi Germany in 1945?
- Where would the 1944 Olympic Games have been held if not cancelled?
- Who replaced Winston Churchill as prime minister of the UK in 1945?
- In which 1949 film does a part of London discover it is part of Burgundy and thus free from rationing?
92
- Which English cathedral was destroyed by bombs in November 1940?
- What distinctive structure was invented by Richard Buckminster Fuller in 1945?
- What mishap occurred during both the 1946 and 1947 FA Cup finals?
- What first did Captain Charles Yeager achieve in 1947?
- Who created the A-line, the H-line and the ‘New Look’ of 1947?
- Under what slogan did Labour plan state assistance throughout a person’s life?
Round 4: Pot Luck
- What is a hurricane in the Pacific called?
- Which is furthest north – Colorado, Montana or Utah?
- In which year was the Cricket World Cup first contested – 1975, 1980 or 1985?
- What was the name of the prefabricated outdoor air-raid shelters erected in British gardens during World War II?
- Which British car company was founded by Lord Nuffield?
- Which guitarist has the nickname Slowhand?
- Which film company has a logo comprising a man striking a gong?
- By what other name are antirrhinums popularly known?
- Which French town lies at the heart of the claret-growing region?
- How many general elections did Margaret Thatcher win?