Thursday, 2 May 2013

... for coins

Last week, after a triumphant victory in the Wates House pub quiz (we got £1.50 each in profit, before you take the purchase of drinks into account), my partner Natasha and her dad, who also took part in the quiz, discussed more lucrative ways to make use of the accumulated bits of assorted information that litters our brains.  In the ensuing post-pub machinations, Natasha signed me up for The £1,000 Minute, which goes out on Smooth Radio every morning.  It's not a station to which I am particularly accustomed, but i didn't protest too strongly when she signed me up.  Lo and behold they got back pretty quickly, and asked me to appear today.

One is supposed to answer 10 questions in one minute, and if you get them all correct, then you get £1,000.  I listened to the slot for the last couple of days, and the questions seemed not too hard, providing that they are all on suitable topics.  Yesterday, for example, there was one about celebrity chefs and I had no idea.

So, at 7:40 this morning they called me up and I was live on Smooth Radio enduring small talk as a preamble to attempting to transfer £1,000 of Guardian Media Group money to the washing machine replacement fund.  Sadly I got off to a terrible start, from which no recovery was possible (mostly because you need to get all ten questions).  I couldn't think of the name of Helen Mirren to the answer of who won the best actress award at the Olivier awards last week, and I would never have been able to answer the next one on the name of the Beckhams' one-year-old daughter.  Then later on, I recognised the opening lines "I was dreaming of the past, and my heart was beating fast" from which I was supposed to identify a song, but I am really bad at linking spoken, not sung, lyrics to songs.  I can't remember all the questions I got right.  Salinger wrote Catcher in the Rye and Bratislava is the capital of Slovakia, and five forgotten others... Oh well.

Fortunately, Smooth Radio don't seem to have a listen again feature, so me doing what I allude to in the title of this blog post is forever lost.  Instead, here's John Lennon's Jealous Guy, the song I failed to spot:

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