Hmm. I may have made that a bit too hard. First off, here are the answers (and I really must avoid the temptation to write this bit in the voice of Kenneth Horne)…
1: Many of you got this, the Doctor and the Red Skull have both been, in their respective languages, known as ‘John Smith’.
2: Captain Midlands is ‘Rambling’ Sid Ridley, the nickname from Rambling Sid Rumpo of Round the Horne, the surname from dear old Arnold Ridley, the actor in Dad’s Army.
3: I’ll take ‘The Long Game’ for a companion throwing up, but I was actually thinking of ‘The Sensorites’, in which Ian is given, off screen, a poison antidote that’s designed to make him do that.
4: The rather self-aggrandising answer to this one is that me, Toby, Rob and Moffat are the only ones who’ve been Hugo nominated for all of their Who episodes. Several other Who writers have created other series, notably Russell!
5: The name Gillian Anderson is indeed mentioned, spookily, in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
6: My local MP is Ed Vaizey, and was thus interested in asking about Robin Hood, where the Sherrif shares his surname. See, you could have got that. Possibly.
7: Steve Wright is the bassist in Stafford, Wright and Reynolds. I have no idea how anyone got that, and I’d love to know!
8: I was indeed seated with the utterly charming Bill Oddie and Xenia Seeberg, who was in Lexx.
9: The name of the planet, in that mad Fortean story, is Serpo. I picked that one because I thought it would take some serious internet skills to find the answer, so well done.
10: Being an archaeologist from the future, Bernice Summerfield has only got a partial record to go on, and thus once decided that the most important musical act of 20th Century Earth was the Wee Papa Girl Rappers. It’s mentioned in a couple of the BF anthologies.
11: In the world of Mushishi, one can indeed be literally reborn by getting your time eaten by the mushi, and becoming an embryo again. Everyone who went for it got it.
12: Under the byline Maria Palmer I wrote the Leo volume for a series of zodiac themed YA novels. I see what people are getting at by saying that the book was about all the signs of the zodiac, but I also said there were no trick questions. And I didn’t ask what name I used.
13: In The Discontinuity Guide, in the ‘Sensorites’ entry, I thought the letters ‘INEER’ on a scrap of uniform indicated that the former wearer was a member of an organisation called INEER, and not, as is more likely, an engineer.
14: The broadsheet newspaper Kate Bush April Fool hoax had it that her Who-themed album was going to be called An Unearthly Child.
15: The first Marvel comic that Ron from I,Fanboy ever read was Excalibur #19.
16: James Hadley Chase wrote No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Murray Smith wrote ‘No Orchids for Missing Blandish’ for Strangers.
17: The oldest, credited on screen, writer of Doctor Who is (probably) Louis Marks, who will be 81 this year. Barry Letts never had an onscreen writer credit (though he probably deserved one), and neither did Donald Tosh. The only other answer I’d have accepted was Mervyn Haisman, since I couldn’t find out how old he is. But I suspect Marks is older.
18: ‘Oideyasu’ is a greeting specific to shops in Kyoto, where a very sweet, formal version of Japanese is spoken, unlike the rough and tumble slang of Osaka.
19: The next person in that list of Marvel Editors-in-Chief is indeed Joseph, that being Joe Quesada.
20: And the Ordinand System was indeed mentioned in Seasons of Fear.
And the winners are:
In the LiveJournal version, it’s Calapine, by a long way.
In the Blogger version, we have a tie, between PG and Rikki.
All three got 14 points. If the winners would like to give me an email address, I’ll get in touch with them and sort out where to send their prizes. Thanks very much everyone for taking part. And Happy New Year! Cheerio!
