Edition #25

Your holiday quiz

The Archive on this website is already becoming uneconomical to maintain, so enjoy it while it lasts.

There’s nothing on TV between the holidays, so why not use the Archive to take a stroll down Memory Lane? Or even Chancery Lane?

Here’s a prompt, by way of a quiz.

All the answers are on the site.

Whether you try it or not, it comes with best wishes for a happy, prosperous, and uneventful New Year from what is jokingly known as The Editorial Board.

1. So who wrote Gentlemen RanKers? (July 13)  
2. Which proprietor once phoned the office to declare, ‘They say I am mad. Send your best reporter.’ July 20
3. Which future editor, visiting his prospective father-in-law, an RAF air-vice-marshal, for the first time, asked for his views on the Spitfire, adding: ‘…Because I came here in one’? (July 30)
4. What job experience do Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Lyndon Johnson, Harry Guy Bartholomew, Ian Skidmore and Eddy Rawlinson share?
5. Which musical did Roy Spicer review for the News Chronicle as ‘Slick, sparkling, spectacular, and with some of the most brilliant dancing seen on the English stage, this colourful musical drama has a weakness – its songs. It has no songs to hum or remember’… before becoming a motoring correspondent?
6. Name the (once-famous) test-tube baby almost choked to death by a man from the National Enquirer?
7. What name connected a print centre in Manchester and a villa in Bermuda sold by Lord Beaverbrook to Gomer Berry? (August 10)
8. When did news editor Dan Ferrari ask a reader to come to the office to demonstrate his time machine? (August 17)
9. Which feature writer famously didn’t file copy for six years? (August 24)
10. Which editor was described as ‘Coiffured like a pre-revolutionary aristo, with luminous cravat and matching luminous socks, he embodied (as he would have put it himself) the de haut en bas approach to the lower orders that so endeared the Bourbons to the inmates of the Bastille’? (August 31)
11. What is it that Malaysians – and only Malaysians – can run? (September 7)
12. What was Christine Keeler’s home phone number? (September 14)
13. Which feature writer decided, at the age of 69, that it would be a good idea to become a Labour MP? (September 21)
14. Which crime reporter had his photo on the front age of every morning paper in the country? (September 28)
15. Which bar boasted having both the World’s Worst Waiter and the World’s Rudest Bartender? (October 5)
16. Who ran a political campaign with the slogan: ‘Vote for me or I’ll kiss your baby’? (October 12)
17. When is it an advantage to be stupid or colonial, or preferably both? (October 19)
18. On what date was the opera Il Ropolfo billed to be performed in Glasgow? (October 26)
19. Who wrote the intro: ‘Two rivers ran silently through London last night…’ (November 2) (It’s a trick question: see also Letters, November 9)
20. Which freelance ran his own fornicatorium? (November 9)
21. How much did it cost to bribe a Manchester Utd star player to pose for photos while kicking a ball? (November 16)
22. How did Strangler Lewis successfully negotiate with his editor for a pay-rise? (November 23)
23. Which was the only genuine bit of the forged British Leyland slush fund letter? (November 30)
24. When the word was coined in the 1880s, what was a tabloid? (December 7)
25. Who was the first female staffer in Moscow (December 14)
26. And finally. What were the five happiest words that Vincent Mulchrone ever wrote?( Last week)

###