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    The Cryptic Pub Quiz Book
    The Cryptic Pub Quiz Book
    The Cryptic Pub Quiz Book
    Ebook369 pages2 hours

    The Cryptic Pub Quiz Book

    By Frank Paul

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Are you a regular quizzer at your local pub? Do you fancy yourself a cryptic crossword whiz? Might you be up for a challenge?

    'Frank Paul is an extremely impressive chap and a dazzling quizzer' Victoria Coren Mitchell, presenter of Only Connect

    Since 2015, The Mill in Cambridge has hosted an unusually fiendish quiz from the mind of legendary quizmaster Frank Paul. Contestants could expect to be delighted and perplexed by wordsearch poems, jokes and rebuses, a bewildering encounter with the Sphinx and a confounding murder mystery.

    With rounds including Motion Picture Mixture, Eight Degrees of Kevin Bacon, Gogglebox Jigsaw and Chemical Element Blind Date, this is the best of The Mill’s quiz night. Are you ready to have your mind bent, blown and boggled?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOneworld Publications
    Release dateApr 4, 2024
    ISBN9780861543984
    The Cryptic Pub Quiz Book
    Author

    Frank Paul

    Frank Paul is a fine artist and a superstar in the world of quizzes. He is the author of The Cryptic Pub Quiz. An Only Connect champion, he was proposed to by Victoria Coren Mitchell on TV. He lives in Cambridge where he runs the notoriously difficult Mill pub quiz.

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      Book preview

      The Cryptic Pub Quiz Book - Frank Paul

      PRAISE FOR FRANK PAUL

      ‘A 21st-century Lewis Carroll. The best quizmasters aim to delight, and Cryptic Pub Quiz does so on every page. This is quizzing where you know the answer but find it only after delicious mental contortions. Relentlessly creative, frequently hilarious and consistently beautiful’

      Alan Connor, author of The Joy of Quiz and question editor for Richard Osman’s House Of Games

      ‘I am most impressed... the questions should offer an enjoyable challenge to those adept at cryptic crossword solving’

      Tim Moorey, author of How to Crack Cryptic Crosswords

      ‘Frank Paul is an extremely impressive chap and a dazzling quizzer; I will be very excited to see his quiz book’

      Victoria Coren Mitchell, presenter of Only Connect

      ‘Frank Paul’s quizzes are learning dressed up to have fun – aerobics of the mind, push-ups of the brain, and tickles of the funny bone.’

      Richard Lederer, author of Anguished English and Get Thee to a Punnery and former co-host of A Way with Words

      ‘Dull men in pubs across the country, who downloaded their quiz for £5 that morning, will ask you the capital of Peru, or who presented The Generation Game after Bruce Forsyth. They are not worthy to lick Frank Paul’s boots.’

      Marcus Berkmann, Daily Mail

      This book is dedicated to my gran, my mum,

      Masha, Eve, Lawrie and Daphna, who have

      always offered their immense love and support,

      and also to Andrew Begg and Tom Short,

      two school friends to whom, as a teenager, I

      made separate promises that if ever I had a

      book published I would dedicate it to them.

      CONTENTS

      PREFACE

      PART ONE:

      ALL FUN AND GAMES

      … Until Someone Loses An ‘i’

      Rebus: Games

      Hunt the Synonyms

      If This Is the Answer, What’s the Question?

      Doctor, Doctor

      What’s the Difference? (No. 1)

      Round the World Trick or Treat

      Pros and Cons

      Sum Fun with Roman Numerals

      Monopoly

      What’s the Difference? (No. 2)

      PART TWO:

      GENERAL FIENDISHNESS

      A Soft Pilchard Towel

      Rebus: Music Makers

      Premature Obituaries

      General Fiendishness (No. 1)

      Foot in Mouth

      The One and Only

      General Fiendishness (No. 2)

      The Oscars

      Lost in Translation

      Rebus: The Beatles

      General Fiendishness (No. 3)

      Namesakes

      The Mail and the Masterpieces

      Cooking with the Stars

      Rebus: Professions

      General Fiendishness (No. 4)

      It Takes Two

      Motion Picture Mixture 59

      PART THREE:

      MAKING CONNECTIONS

      Spot the Link (No. 1)

      Picture Connections

      It’s Analogy Season! (No. 1)

      Eight Degrees of Kevin Bacon

      Spot the Link (No. 2)

      It’s Analogy Season! (No. 2)

      What do the Following Have in Common? (No. 1)

      Spot the Similarities

      It’s Analogy Season! (No. 3)

      What do the Following Have in Common? (No. 2)

      Time Flies Venn You’re Having Fun 80

      PART FOUR:

      POETIC JUSTICE

      The Hidden Poem

      Wordsearch Poem: Birds

      Anagram Poem: Fictional birds

      Wordsearch Poem: Capitals

      The Clerihews of E.C. Bentley

      Wordsearch Poem: Cheese

      Anagram Poem: Fictional Education

      The Rhymester’s Fury

      Wordsearch Poem: Bones

      Complete the Limericks

      Wordsearch Poem: Mythical Creatures

      More Eloquence than You Could Shake a Spear At

      Complete the Limericks, Another Way

      Wordsearch Poem: Cars

      Anagram Poem: Women Who Changed the World

      PART FIVE:

      WORDPLAY

      Holy Mackerel!

      2 Become 1 (No. 1)

      Fill in the Blanks

      Add the Animal

      Anagrams Plus One (No. 1)

      Palindrome (No. 1)

      It All Adds Up: Television

      Anagrams: Personal Ads

      Crawl Inside My Idiom Attic

      Alphabetical Antics (No. 1)

      Gogglebox Jigsaw

      Words of Character

      Palindrome (No. 2)

      Build Your Own Wordsearch

      Alphabetical Antics (No. 2)

      2 Become 1 (No. 2)

      Words with Women

      The End is the Beginning is the End

      Palindrome (No. 3)

      Anagrams Plus One (No. 2)

      Backwards Cinema

      Hidden Lands

      Rebus Crossword

      Part 1

      Part 2

      PART SIX:

      LET’S GO EXPLORING

      Disco Island Des

      Henrietta Sneep, Speech Therapist

      Advent Calendar of Doom

      Chemical Element Blind Date

      Riddles of the Sphinx

      Groundhog Day

      The Murder Mystery

      To Set the Scene:

      The Murder Mystery, Round 1

      The Murder Mystery, Round 2

      The Murder Mystery, Round 3

      Rebus: Weapons

      The Murder Mystery, Round 4

      And Finally…

      TIE BREAKERS
      ANSWERS
      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      I have always loved puzzles. As a child, I would draw mazes, making them as complicated as I could, filling the page with tiny paths, eager to watch my mum meander through them with her finger. She was the one I trusted most to solve my mazes, as only she had worked out my secret, never-spoken rule: that I would only be satisfied if she blundered down every single dead end before reaching the exit. I later fell under the spell of a book by one Norman D. Willis, whom I pictured as suave and heroic. His puzzles were set in enthrallingly bizarre worlds populated by people who only lied or only told the truth or alternated between truth and lies. I created my own versions, which I would spring on my mum. The more I worked on these puzzles, the more elaborate they became, until she could no longer figure them out. After gazing at the puzzle with a slightly tragic air, punctuated by marvelling at my ingenuity – as if that in itself would placate me – she would entreat me to let her give up. I urged her to persevere, to give me the pleasure of witnessing her weave together my delicately placed clues, and she would stare with a pained expression for a little longer before declaring that she was stumped. There was no one else I would have felt comfortable showing these puzzles to; if my work had been scoffed at, I would have been crushed.

      I had never particularly gone in for quizzes before meeting Masha, the person I would go on to marry. But I grew fonder of them as time went on. We discovered that we enjoyed quizzes for different reasons. She liked the social aspect of quizzing, exchanging suggestions with our friends, discovering more about their experience and interests, feeling a sense of camaraderie strengthened by sharing a common goal. I thrived on the knowledge I could display and the facts that I was acquiring with each new quiz.

      When Masha was planning to take up a volunteering placement, the charity asked all of their prospective volunteers to raise funds for them, and among their suggestions was to run a quiz. I’d had idle daydreams about running a quiz before but never considered it in earnest – yet as soon as I heard the suggestion, I was filled with the unshakeable conviction that this was what I longed to do.

      My debut quiz as a presenter was far from a roaring success. I realised as I read out the questions that it was far too hard, showing no mercy to contestants ignorant of certain fairly obscure pieces of trivia, and I felt the jollity in the atmosphere being palpably sucked from the air. As I’d been compiling the questions, Masha had objected to their difficulty, but I’d assured her that people wouldn’t mind because they’d be so looking forward to the interesting facts I would reveal as I announced the answers. She’d been right all along! I wondered what I would change if I ever got the chance to present a quiz again.

      My chance came two years later: we heard that the quizmaster at a local pub, The Mill, had retired, and I took over. This time, I made sure to write questions where the answers could be figured out even if the contestants didn’t know them at first, questions whose solutions could be deduced – in gratifying penny-dropping moments – from elaborate wordplay or hidden connections. I would be overwhelmed with nerves as I walked from my house to the pub. I would arrive half an hour early, and spend the time pacing the path by the river, dreading the inevitable moment when I would be compelled to start the quiz.

      In my first season at The Mill, a girl turned up soon before the quiz was due to start. She asked if I set the quiz. Then she asked what my favourite quiz show was. She posed this second question with a suspicious air which, though tongue-in-cheek, gave the impression that a lot was riding on the answer.

      ‘It’s a toss-up between Pointless and Only Connect,’ I replied, apprehensive but taking solace in the fact that I had uttered a sincere opinion which I could defend if necessary. I was unused to being on the receiving end of an interrogation; there was something rather refreshing about it.

      ‘Those are the two best answers!’ she enthused with wide eyes.

      This girl was Lydia; she and her friend Natalie became regulars at the quiz. On Lydia’s birthday, the two of them came round for supper. She asked if I’d like to join her and her boyfriend Tom to apply for Only Connect. Though applying for Only Connect had never occurred to me before (and, she later told me, the idea of asking me to join her in applying had never occurred to her before that instant), I bellowed, ‘Yes!’ without a moment’s hesitation. The show had been a revelation, an inspiration to me, its questions drawn as much from the world of cryptic crosswords as from general knowledge, showing me the glittering path away from straightforward quizzing to something more creative, beautiful and eccentric. The contestants seemed to possess extraordinary reserves of knowledge and powers of deduction.

      One warm spring morning, Lydia, Tom and I walked by the dock in Cardiff, asking each other questions from Thomas Eaton’s Guardian quiz. Our episode of Only Connect was to film that day. At the studio – not the gleaming, glass-fronted edifice of my imagination but a long, brown, warehouse-like building nestled in an industrial estate – our opponents’ captain regaled us with tales of reaching a record-breaking number of Fifteen to One grand finals and winning £14,000 on Eggheads. By the time we were called in, my nerves were out of control, my brain like a pinball machine gone haywire. Victoria Coren Mitchell arrived, briskly had a photo taken standing just behind each of the teams, and advised us that we shouldn’t worry about getting things wrong because no one at home knew any of the answers. And before I could say ‘Stop, I’m not ready!’, we were off.

      Our opponents built a heart-sinkingly strong lead after Round 1, we clawed our way back on Round 2, and then, on our connecting wall, we were given full marks! But Tom had answered one group of clues with ‘Irish presidents’ where the correct answer had been ‘Taoisigh’; Victoria had let us have the points, but was now deep in conversation with the question-setters via her earpiece. After an agonising, stomach-twisting wait, three points were snatched from our grasp and our opponents had a commanding lead as we entered the final round.

      We lost the game by four points. I’d said barely anything over the course of the match, and what I had said had been largely nonsense: I’d persuaded my team to plump for a wrong answer because I’d misheard ‘The Steve Miller Band’ as ‘Steve Miliband’,

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