Last year was a bit of a year for Radio 4 anniversaries; maybe most notably, Desert Island Discs celebrated 70 years on air. But oddly enough, so did another show. Round Britain Quiz, which you may remember vaguely from your childhood, or possibly your parents’ childhood, also reached 70 in 2017. There have been one or two breaks, but this abstruse and, let’s face it, unashamedly smart show has survived the slings and arrows of outrageous Radio 4 controllers. Every year we fret and worry, hoping beyond hope that it will be recommissioned. Every year, I’m glad to say, it is. I say ‘we’ because, for the past few years, I have been part of the merry crew that makes the programme. It’s one of the very best jobs in the world.
Round Britain Quiz is only round Britain because it has six teams from various parts of the island: North of England, South of England, Midlands, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland. Each team is of two, and people tend to be asked back if they haven’t done atrociously. Indeed, when I first took part as a late substitute in 2012, everyone had been asked back for so many years that, at 52, I was the second youngest person there. Producer Paul Bajoria, who masterminds all this with what cricketers call ‘soft hands’, has quietly retired a few teams since then, and I have ceased, with some relief, to be his youth policy. (I am now solidly mid-table in age terms.) I came back permanently in the 2015 series, and this year we recorded almost all of the current series, ten shows, in early October, in a savage burst of two-and-a-half days. My partner on the South of England team is Paul Sinha, a stand-up comedian and quiz nutter with a ferociously good general knowledge.
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