Ah, memories ...
A new series of Counterpoint, BBC Radio 4's annual general knowledge music quiz, has just started. I've just listened to the first heat over the net (you can do so via the link) and it's brought back heaps of memories from the time I took part. So here, in the spirit of nostalgia, is what I wrote about the occasion in my diary - the date: 11th February 2003.
[Bit of general context to start off with: each heat sees three contestants compete for a place in the semi-final. There are three rounds: no. 1 sees everyone asked questions in turn with 2 points for a correct answer, 1 if you pick it up after the original contestant gets it wrong; no. 2 is a specialist round on subjects you're given no advance warning about; no. 3 is on the buzzers, 1 point for a correct answer, minus 1 for a wrong one. The programme is recorded in Manchester, so my parents and I met at the station (they'd come from London, I was living in Glasgow at the time), dropped off our overnight bags at the hotel and headed to the Royal Northern College of Music, the venue for the recording. We'd just arrived there when this extract begins.]
Paul Hardy [one of the producers] (in a vile purple shirt which seemed to be part of some uniform; at any rate there was a woman in a suit of the same colour) recognised me - presumably by voice and age, as I was conspicuously younger than any of the other contestants - and ushered me to one side, together with the other contestants in question, before leading the nine of us into the studio theatre for the preliminaries.
They were largely a matter of introducing the adjudication panel - Ned Sherrin [the show's host] himself, his producers (Pauls both), the scorer (a rather dishy man called Stephen) and "clever Mr Köchel" [a sort of adjudicator in case of disputes] who's taken the place of the late "young Grove" - reminding us of the rules and generally putting us at our ease. Two things could have served to make me really nervous, namely some of the others speaking of their playing on other game shows (one of the two women, who coincidentally shard their birthdays today, had been very secretive about her choice of show for today, leaving her family with the impression she was to go on Blind Date! [the British version of The dating game] and my noticing that one of the name boards for the contestants in the first heat had my name on it, but the atmosphere was pretty relaxed.
The audience were let in, Mother and Father managing to get themselves directly in my line of vision (the former told me afterwards she'd made an effort not to look at me, and luckily Father didn't look anywhere in particular as he tried to answer the questions or quietly conferred with Mother), and we got going with a dry run, rehearsing thethirdd round (on the buzzers) to get us used to the style of the thing. Then it all started - "three contestants from the North of England and Scotland" (guess who was the sole Scot?), all required to introduce ourselves with no prior warning. At the end of the recording we re-did the introductions, whereupon I described myself more correctly - though less interestingly - as working in retail and living in Glasgow.
The first round went reasonably, with me ending up second despite getting a number of my own questions wrong - I'm sure my technique of covering the buzzer with my right hand so the others couldn't see if I was planning to pick up a point as necessary, worked well. The woman supposedly on Blind Date did disappointingly, leaving my main bit of competition with a Mr M., who knew his non-classical questions better than Mrs C. and I. Then we heard the choices for the second round: in no particular order, the music of Richard Rodgers, swinging London, French opera and operetta, and classical music and sport. The look Father gave Mother said it all!
Mr M. went, unsurprisingly, for swinging London. My turn was next, but I asked Ned to read out the choices again: "you can't have swinging London," he started ,whereupon I retorted "good!" (got a laugh and a "you're too young to remember" from Ned, the only acknowledgment of my age there was [though the whole exchange was edited out of the broadcast]). Richard Rodgers I was going to be hopeless at, so it was between sport and French opera. I decided bluffing about the three tenors was going to be insufficient so went for French opera, as at least I could pronounce the names correctly (unlike my hesitation over Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk district in one of the other rounds) and promptly jotted down all the names of French opera composers I could think of, even as far as Rossini and Donizetti, some of whose works had, I recalled, been written in French.
There was nothing on the baroque composers despite my having noted Rameau, Charpentier and Lully, but they fitted in a question about Debussy which I got wrong (couldn't think of a French conductor who might have conducted Pelléas et Mélisande at Covent Garden, though as Father pointed out afterwards, I ought to have guessed the (correct) answer as being Boulez), one to which the answer was Prosper Mérimée (Carmen, by which one of the other contestants was most impressed, even when I told him why I knew that one) and another on the subject of Rossini's final opera, which got its first performance in Paris - William Tell - much to my smug pleasure. However, I missed Berlioz' Benvenuto Cellini (think I said The Trojans, the only opera of his I could think of as having anything to do with the ancient world) and at one point, unintentionally but auspiciously got Ned to reveal that a chorus I was listening to with a view to naming it and the ofrom fron which it came wasn't Berlioz, which meant I could say (Gounod's) Faust with some degree of confidence even if I didn't recognise it as the soldiers' chorus.
Mrs C. had caught up with me in her round on sports, which I was very glad not to have picked (though I'd've got Honegger's Rugby and Britten's diary on playing cricket at his school in Suffolk), but my score of 15 (I think) was no match for Mr M., who steamed on ahead, quite possibly with a clean slate, into the final round. If I was to get through to the semi-final, he was the one I'd have to beat.
It didn't help that my mind went blank on a question about glissandi on the piano [my father teased me about it ever afterwards], but I put up a fair fight all the same, getting Pictures at an ... fluffed but perfectly right (I'd risked waiting for confirmation that the orchestrators mentioned had worked on music by Mussorgsky, after falling foul of an incorrect answer when interrupting a question on Manon in the warm-up - not Puccini but Massenet) but even so there was no way I could catch up. Mr M. was declared the winner (Mrs C. had been left trailing by this stage) and that was that.
The aftermath was very peculiar: my father was left fuming about the increase in non-classical questions compared to previous years (to an extent that went a long way beyond merely showing family solidarity) and went on about it for quite some time afterwards. After the broadcast, I got a very peculiar email from one of my uncles (also a musician) stopping just short of blaming Mrs C. for my losing - apparently, if she'd known more about the non-classical side of things, that would have evened out the points a bit and enabled me to come out in the lead. We have a very strange sense of loyalty in my family!
What both my father and uncle failed to realise was that I had wanted to take part for the fun of it. It didn't matter whether I got through to the next round as long as I enjoyed the experience. I did - and may well enter the competition again sometime. Give it time ...
[Bit of general context to start off with: each heat sees three contestants compete for a place in the semi-final. There are three rounds: no. 1 sees everyone asked questions in turn with 2 points for a correct answer, 1 if you pick it up after the original contestant gets it wrong; no. 2 is a specialist round on subjects you're given no advance warning about; no. 3 is on the buzzers, 1 point for a correct answer, minus 1 for a wrong one. The programme is recorded in Manchester, so my parents and I met at the station (they'd come from London, I was living in Glasgow at the time), dropped off our overnight bags at the hotel and headed to the Royal Northern College of Music, the venue for the recording. We'd just arrived there when this extract begins.]
Paul Hardy [one of the producers] (in a vile purple shirt which seemed to be part of some uniform; at any rate there was a woman in a suit of the same colour) recognised me - presumably by voice and age, as I was conspicuously younger than any of the other contestants - and ushered me to one side, together with the other contestants in question, before leading the nine of us into the studio theatre for the preliminaries.
They were largely a matter of introducing the adjudication panel - Ned Sherrin [the show's host] himself, his producers (Pauls both), the scorer (a rather dishy man called Stephen) and "clever Mr Köchel" [a sort of adjudicator in case of disputes] who's taken the place of the late "young Grove" - reminding us of the rules and generally putting us at our ease. Two things could have served to make me really nervous, namely some of the others speaking of their playing on other game shows (one of the two women, who coincidentally shard their birthdays today, had been very secretive about her choice of show for today, leaving her family with the impression she was to go on Blind Date! [the British version of The dating game] and my noticing that one of the name boards for the contestants in the first heat had my name on it, but the atmosphere was pretty relaxed.
The audience were let in, Mother and Father managing to get themselves directly in my line of vision (the former told me afterwards she'd made an effort not to look at me, and luckily Father didn't look anywhere in particular as he tried to answer the questions or quietly conferred with Mother), and we got going with a dry run, rehearsing thethirdd round (on the buzzers) to get us used to the style of the thing. Then it all started - "three contestants from the North of England and Scotland" (guess who was the sole Scot?), all required to introduce ourselves with no prior warning. At the end of the recording we re-did the introductions, whereupon I described myself more correctly - though less interestingly - as working in retail and living in Glasgow.
The first round went reasonably, with me ending up second despite getting a number of my own questions wrong - I'm sure my technique of covering the buzzer with my right hand so the others couldn't see if I was planning to pick up a point as necessary, worked well. The woman supposedly on Blind Date did disappointingly, leaving my main bit of competition with a Mr M., who knew his non-classical questions better than Mrs C. and I. Then we heard the choices for the second round: in no particular order, the music of Richard Rodgers, swinging London, French opera and operetta, and classical music and sport. The look Father gave Mother said it all!
Mr M. went, unsurprisingly, for swinging London. My turn was next, but I asked Ned to read out the choices again: "you can't have swinging London," he started ,whereupon I retorted "good!" (got a laugh and a "you're too young to remember" from Ned, the only acknowledgment of my age there was [though the whole exchange was edited out of the broadcast]). Richard Rodgers I was going to be hopeless at, so it was between sport and French opera. I decided bluffing about the three tenors was going to be insufficient so went for French opera, as at least I could pronounce the names correctly (unlike my hesitation over Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk district in one of the other rounds) and promptly jotted down all the names of French opera composers I could think of, even as far as Rossini and Donizetti, some of whose works had, I recalled, been written in French.
There was nothing on the baroque composers despite my having noted Rameau, Charpentier and Lully, but they fitted in a question about Debussy which I got wrong (couldn't think of a French conductor who might have conducted Pelléas et Mélisande at Covent Garden, though as Father pointed out afterwards, I ought to have guessed the (correct) answer as being Boulez), one to which the answer was Prosper Mérimée (Carmen, by which one of the other contestants was most impressed, even when I told him why I knew that one) and another on the subject of Rossini's final opera, which got its first performance in Paris - William Tell - much to my smug pleasure. However, I missed Berlioz' Benvenuto Cellini (think I said The Trojans, the only opera of his I could think of as having anything to do with the ancient world) and at one point, unintentionally but auspiciously got Ned to reveal that a chorus I was listening to with a view to naming it and the ofrom fron which it came wasn't Berlioz, which meant I could say (Gounod's) Faust with some degree of confidence even if I didn't recognise it as the soldiers' chorus.
Mrs C. had caught up with me in her round on sports, which I was very glad not to have picked (though I'd've got Honegger's Rugby and Britten's diary on playing cricket at his school in Suffolk), but my score of 15 (I think) was no match for Mr M., who steamed on ahead, quite possibly with a clean slate, into the final round. If I was to get through to the semi-final, he was the one I'd have to beat.
It didn't help that my mind went blank on a question about glissandi on the piano [my father teased me about it ever afterwards], but I put up a fair fight all the same, getting Pictures at an ... fluffed but perfectly right (I'd risked waiting for confirmation that the orchestrators mentioned had worked on music by Mussorgsky, after falling foul of an incorrect answer when interrupting a question on Manon in the warm-up - not Puccini but Massenet) but even so there was no way I could catch up. Mr M. was declared the winner (Mrs C. had been left trailing by this stage) and that was that.
The aftermath was very peculiar: my father was left fuming about the increase in non-classical questions compared to previous years (to an extent that went a long way beyond merely showing family solidarity) and went on about it for quite some time afterwards. After the broadcast, I got a very peculiar email from one of my uncles (also a musician) stopping just short of blaming Mrs C. for my losing - apparently, if she'd known more about the non-classical side of things, that would have evened out the points a bit and enabled me to come out in the lead. We have a very strange sense of loyalty in my family!
What both my father and uncle failed to realise was that I had wanted to take part for the fun of it. It didn't matter whether I got through to the next round as long as I enjoyed the experience. I did - and may well enter the competition again sometime. Give it time ...
posted by Anthony at
14:59
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