Fifteen-to-One - Schools 02
The story of five kids (plus a reserve) from Westbourne on the telly. At the end of a normal episode of 15 to 1 in September 1998, William G. Stewart, the presenter bloke, announced that a one-off schools' show made earlier in the year had been successful enough for a whole series to be made, and gave out an address for applications. After checking that there were enough others interested (and clever) enough in the Sixth Form (of course there were), we sent off a highly optimistic application for details. Back came the letter, asking if we were interested. We were, so we sent it back, and waited. And waited. 1999 arrived, and still nothing. Until...
"Thank you for your interest... we would now like to audition six students from your school... ON: SATURDAY 20TH FEBRUARY AT:
2.00PM (PROMPT) (Note use of fear-inducing bold type)...MALET STREET...LONDON..."
Amazing. If nothing else, at least we'd probably get to meet some of the technical crew. Problem being, at this point I wasn't totally sure who "we" were, as the team (five players plus a reserve, as the letter requested) only contained me at this point, and the prospect of five times me is enough to make anyone try and escape the country. So I drew up 30 questions of the breed that we may be asked on the show, and decided to take the four people with the highest scores onto the team, and the fifth highest as the reserve. This oh-so-strict method gave us our team: me (in charge), Daniel Pulham (23 correct), Andrew Cook (22) Nicholas "Nick" Bottini (20), Sarah Fisher (18), and our reserve, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Stannard (14).
So we had our team. Stage one was the audition. Here's a diary of thoughts from that day.
9:10am - Arrive at Ipswich Railway Station with Nick. Daniel, Andrew, Lizzie, Miss Stubbens and Mrs Rudway (in charge of us) are already there, ready with tickets. A bit strange, I think, as we don't leave for another 20 minutes.
9:28am - Sarah arrives. Her lift was held up, apparently (a likely story). We get on the train, and find that the most interesting thing to comment about is a £2.99 HMV sticker on the post outside the window.
9:45am - Somewhere on a train between Ipswich and London. Our incompatible schedules in Sixth Form (or "some of us oversleep, others go home early, some even actually work") meant that we have only all been present at the same time in school to practise for about 30 minutes, and must do the bulk of our training now. This mostly involves me and Daniel firing random questions from a book dating from the antediluvian era at the rest of the team.
10:40am - Arrive at Liverpool Street Station, knowing the lifetime's careers of Valentina Tereshkova, and how much milk is needed to make a pound of cheddar. Take the tube to somewhere near Malet Street. In the two hours before we are needed, we (the students) are allowed to go free, and decide to make the first of what will turn out to be many trips to a certain fast food chain.
1:45pm - Having managed to avoid getting lost, we reconvene outside the ULU in the warm February sunshine (no, really). While waiting, the current pastime is guessing which groups of people going in are students at ULU, and which are the enemy (other teams).
2:00pm - We're in the audition hall, a third floor badminton court. Upon arriving, we fill in forms, put on some identity stickers, and get paid for our travel. Each of the 15 schools there has its own row of chairs facing the front, but straight away we all have to go into the room next door to do the written part of the audition. With 60 multiple choice questions in 4 minutes (4 seconds per question), the questions aren't too difficult, but the rush is off-putting. The time ends, and some students seem to have already given up. But not us. Oh no.
2:30pm - Auditioning starts, done in exactly the same form as the actual show. The schools from furthest away go first, so we form the "audience" for them. Annoyingly, we know the answers to most of their questions, a bad omen for when it's our turn?
4:00pm - Our turn. We take positions 11 to 15 behind the chairs, no particular reason why, we just happened to be nearest to them. My first question comes up: "Which two countries form the Scandinavian Peninsula?" Umm, I think....not Finland, that borders Russia so can't stick off the edge, not Iceland or Denmark, cos they're separate, so it must be...... "Norway and Sweden". Phew. I'm so relieved to get that one that I miss the rest of the team's first five questions, and suddenly it's my go again. "Which ocean covers a greater area than all the land of the Earth?" Quick, think about that atlas..."The Atlantic?" BUZZ! "The Pacific", says Philip, who's reading the questions today, a sort of William G. Stewart by proxy. Of course this is true, but the Pacific is cut in half in most British printed atlases. I still should have got that one. More questions come to us: we narrowly get away with Sarah saying that the currencies of Hong Kong, Canada and Australia are all called the Australian Dollar, Nick gets a question on fashion right by literally translating "prêt à porter" then later admits he only got it because he does French A-level, and Lizzie watches us from the (now considerably depleted) audience with a look of abject terror, a bit like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car that hasn't noticed.
Umm, 5:00 pm? I forget - Our audition over, researchers Debbie and Camille file their notes on us and we leave. On the ground floor, we spend our £2 each food expenses in the ULU's food store (or "cupboard", it was so small). The London Pound is currently very strong against the Rest Of Britain pound, so £2 gets next to nothing, and a sandwich and tiny box drink seems a bargain.
5:30pm - Back on the train, only Nick seems confident that we've been successful, pointing to our ability to confer where other teams just stayed like very lifelike statues. The rest of us point to our hopelessness on politics and geography (two staple 15 To 1 subjects, along with Shakespeare and the Elgin Marbles).
6:30pm - Arrive back in Ipswich, appropriately the last trace of sunlight has just gone. We all leave for our homes, and try to get on with normal life in the meantime.
And so another school week passed after that. Nothing interesting, the usual routine. Until the next Friday, when a fax arrived from London. Amongst other things, it said:
"We are happy to inform you that following the auditions you have been selected to field your team in the Fifteen-To-One Schools Series."
So there it was. We'd been successful in getting Westbourne High School onto national television for the first time since the infamous "Swot Or Wot" and the even more infamous appearance by Mr Stott ("No, sorry, it's gone") Given this sparkling history, we knew we had to do well, or we'd tarnish a top-level televisual reputation. So we initiated an intense training regime. Or rather, we didn't. After one session first thing on a Friday morning, when five of us turned up, we never again found it possible for more than three of us to be in the same place at the same time.
We each received our own photocopy of the letter, which also told us about the rules about what happens while we are there. Nine different rules dictated what we could and couldn't wear, so reflective, striped, checked, pure white and short-sleeved shirts, as well as blatant adverts and political slogans or organisations were all no-nos. This ruled out the entirety of my wardrobe, so I used my usual solution-in-a-crisis of shopping, and got a "trendy" Moto top for £16. Bargain. And it doesn't need ironing.
Anyway, April 5th came about with the inevitability of a question about English counties, and because it was in the middle of the school holiday, we'd had a week to prepare for our big day.
Here's what happened on our second trip to London:
9:10am - Arrive with Nick at Ipswich Railway Station. This time, everyone else (with Mrs Rudway replaced by Mr Shaw) is already there with their tickets. Feel deep shame at being last person there, having preached to be on time endless times to the rest of the team. While waiting for the train to start moving, we play the "people-spotting" game with the people still on the platform (more about this later).
9:30am - Leave Ipswich. This trip is filled with further revision from the quiz books we found at the back of our bookshelves, although most of the questions are based around the Weetabix atlas, which has kindly been supplied by Nick. Lizzie asks me what the area of water between Anglesey and mainland Wales is called. I don't know. It's the Menai Straits, apparently. Must remember that, it might come in useful.
10:40am - Arrive at Liverpool Street Station, immediately visit our team's official fast food supplier again. Discuss tactics for tomorrow. "Get all the questions right" seems to be our main strategy.
11:15am - Get on the tube towards East Putney. The London Underground, which for most of this route wasn't actually underground, is packed on most of its trains today, so it's standing room only. This is probably a good thing, as any deodorant that can survive this will find a TV studio to be no problem at all. I have two very obvious wet patches, but they are pleasantly fragrant, so nobody seems to mind.
12:15pm - Reach East Putney. Despite paying for just about everything else, the budget of Regent Productions doesn't stretch to a limo, so we have to walk to the hotel. It's not too far, which is just as well considering the 10 ton bag I'm carrying. At the hotel, we do the usual: signing in, observing the bowl of mints on the reception desk, depositing our bags in our rooms, emptying the bowl of mints on the reception desk, and then go to the studios to be today's reserves, tomorrow's contenders.
12:40pm - The very expensive front of Capital Studios feature two very heavy doors, which seem too close together for one person alone to get through, let alone eight people in a row. Having navigated this puzzle, very possibly a reject from an early series of The Crystal Maze, we sign in, and researcher Debbie from the audition leads us through some corridors and a courtyard full of irritatingly young and pretty technical crew to our green room, where we are to stay until they finish for today. All today's teams are already here, so barring any unforeseen mass vomit type incident, we won't be needed until tomorrow. This could be a problem, it smells as if someone who was not very well has been in here...
Some time in the early afternoon - There's not much to do in here. One of the young dogsbodies turns on the television, showing a channel that shows live pictures of what's going on in the studio. Our earlier-than-planned arrival means that there are two shows left to be recorded today. We watch today's second show, realising that we're all getting a worryingly high proportion of the questions right, and laugh at the general incompetence of the teams who are actually supposed to be answering them. Confidence in our appearance tomorrow has suddenly become very high. Which car company's name is made of four words that begin with F, I, A and T?
2:35pm - Recording of that show has finished. The 20 or so people involved with those three teams briefly invade our territory to reclaim their baggage which is strewn across the floor, and then leave. Another dogsbody then enters the room, and inadvertently reveals the source of the unpleasant smell to be the coffee jar on top of the radiator, the contents of which may or may not be older than William G. Stewart himself. It's certainly a close run thing.
2:40pm - Sarah discovers a telephone and list of numbers on the wall in one corner. We are interested for all of five seconds to discover that one of these numbers belongs to Frank Skinner. It would have been longer, but Andrew has been flicking the channels on the television, and has just discovered that Wheel Of Fortune is on. Can you guess what we'll be doing for the next half hour, children?
3:10pm - Rather disappointed that Wheel Of Fortune has finished (although impressed by Sarah's ability to get any puzzle with about two letters) and that the recording of the next 15 to 1 hasn't started yet, we continue to surf the television waves, coming across the wasteland that is Channel 5, where another quiz, Cryptogram, is starting. We soon wish that we hadn't discovered this, as this sample question may explain.
Category: "Directions".
Anagram: PU.
Honestly, I am not making this up.
3:30pm - Recording of the third show of today begins, and once again we get too many questions right. A fear begins to set in that this is because all the impossible questions are waiting for us tomorrow when we do it for real. An interesting, if slightly pointless note about this show: it featured a team from Withington Girls' School in Manchester, and a fanzine editor called Ali who I know is friends with the team. That's it, I'm afraid.
5:00pm - Recording over, we go back to the hotel, and decide that this is a ridiculously early hour to be eating, so we all go back to our rooms to revise. Rather than doing what "normal" people would do and all going to the same room, however, we all go back to our own rooms and conduct revision via the telephones. Strange as it may seem, this actually appears to work.
7:00pm - Bored/sick of revision, which is just as well as it's time to eat. As I may or may not have mentioned (I can't be bothered to read through all I've written), the Lodge Hotel is no two-bit B&B, and actually has a proper, like, restaurant and everything. We go in and very much enjoy a three-course meal in part of the restaurant that is (possibly unintentionally) done up to resemble a pretty greenhouse, and (yawn) more revision. Nothing special about that, maybe, but the whole thing (except wine, for some reason) is free to us, paid for by Channel 4. Hey kids, this is what those stairlift adverts with Thora Hird in pay for. To do my Egon Ronay bit, I'd best mention that this is the only place I know anywhere that has made new potatoes bearable. 5 stars.
7:30pm - In a disturbing act of timing, two other groups of eight people, like us with a younger person/old... sorry, older person ratio of 6:2, arrive all at once. Cue many giggly mumblings of things like "hey, that's the opposition" and suchlike from us, and a general feeling of "well, it's a two-horse race tomorrow" from the other teams. Actually, that last bit could just be paranoia on our part.
8:30pm - We return to our rooms, upset that we have to get up as early as 7:30am tomorrow morning. However, we are teenagers, after all, so a piffling little thing like that isn't gonna make us go to bed right yet, and instead we continue our telephonic revision, despite the fact that Sarah has given up on us and answers everything she's asked with "The Menai Straits".
Some time post-11pm - Finally manage to get to sleep, an achievement at the best of times.