Frequently Asked Questions
What is the capital of
Who wrote ‘The Insulted and
Injured’?
Dostoyevski.
How many beans make five?
Five.
Where was Wenclaslas king of?
And the Feast of Steven, what’s
that?
Well, I’m glad you asked me that.
St Stephen’s day is December the 26th, known as ‘Boxing Day’ after
the practice of letting apprentices go collecting money in boxes, and ‘Hunt the
Wren’ after the pagan custom of hunting a wren, or latterly, visiting your
friends’ houses to sing about it. The long winter evenings used to just fly by.
Is there anything special about
William IV?
No, not as far as we know, which
may be why the BBC has never made him the subject of a costume drama. He was brother
to George IV (formerly the Prince Regent), and he reigned between 1830 and
1837. And he was the only English king called William not to die on horseback.
How do you spell Habakkuk?
H-A-B-A-K-K-U-K... One B,
two Ks... three Ks, sorry.
So, Kit Marlowe was stabbed in a
Deptford tavern, wow! Can you tell us anything else about Deptford?
Yes, now you come to mention it.
It played host to Peter the Great, Tsar of all the
Back in 1975, when you thought
about the year 2000, did you imagine that people would be wearing flares,
listening to ABBA, and riding scooters?
No.
Did you know that the Daily Mail
supported Hitler?
Comes as no surprise to me at all.
Who’s the Roman statue in
Well, funnily enough, it’s James
II (1685-1688). He tried to force England back to Catholicism (and failed), and
he enjoyed watching people being tortured. I don’t know whether he ever dressed
up as a Roman, but he did once dress up as a woman in order to escape
from the Roundheads. So it’s quite possibly a spelling mistake.
Can you think of any reason
whatsoever why anyone should possibly vote for George Bush?
No.
In the song ‘Don’t Stand So Close
To Me’, Sting rhymes ‘Starts to cough’ with ‘Famous book by Nabokov’. Apart
from being an atrocious rhyme, this seems most obscure. What book is he
referring to?
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.
Who is the world’s greatest
cartoonist?
Bud Handelsman.
Rotten weather.
Yes, and I’ve got to go out in a
minute.
Do you know an amusing poem about
ducks?
Oh God, you just had to ask that…