Trivia Masterclass: Week 5

Science, Soaps, Highbrow/Lowbrow

Welcome back to week 4! Huge thanks for joining me on this journey of quiz revision — I really hope you enjoy it. If you haven’t already, I’d recommend having a quick read of my introductory post ( https://substack.com/home/post/p-161751014?source=queue) where I say something about the philosophy of these weekly quizzes and why I’ve structured them in the way I have.

As with previous weeks, you’ll find the answers to each round immediately after said round, rather than all together at the end. And if a question begins “[PICTURE]” then it relates in some way to the image included at the beginning of the round: there will be one such question in every round.

Feel free to post your scores in the comments, and especially to share answers you’re proud of, frustrating misses, facts you found interesting, or extra information — I’m keen for this to be an active community so conversation is encouraged, provided you all keep it friendly and respectful.

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Round 1 — Warm-Up

1. [PICTURE] What meringue-based dessert topped with fruit and whipped cream was invented in either Australia or New Zealand in the early 20th century and named after a prominent ballet dancer of the time?

2. What kind of supernatural creatures are Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde, the adversaries which the player must avoid in the 1980s arcade game Pac-Man?

3. Also one of the code-words in the NATO phonetic alphabet, what is the capital and largest city of Peru?

4. Having made her film breakthrough opposite Warwick Davis in the 1993 horror-comedy movie Leprechaun, which actor’s defining role arrived the following year on TV, as Rachel Green in Friends?

5. Derived from an Ancient Greek name for a mixing-bowl, what six-letter word can refer either to a bowl-shaped depression on a planet’s surface caused by the impact of a meteorite, or to the mouth of a volcano?

6. Which song, originally written and recorded by Leonard Cohen, was covered by Jeff Buckley on his 1994 album Grace and topped the UK charts in 2008 sung by X Factor winner Alexandra Burke?

7. In darts, how many points are scored by landing a dart in the outer bull, the green ring surrounding the central bullseye?

8. His name still used today to describe a person wielding an invidious private influence over a public figure, which peasant-born faith healer became one of the most powerful figures in the court of Russian Tsar Nicholas II, largely due to his supposed mystic ability to halt the bleeding of the Tsar’s haemophiliac son Alexei?

9. First published in 1791, making it the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, which UK paper operated as a sister-paper of The Guardian until 2025 when it was bought by online news company Tortoise Media?

10. Which South African-born cookery writer and broadcaster spent eleven series as a judge on Great British Menu before replacing Mary Berry as a judge on The Great British Bake Off in 2017?

11. What famous Renaissance painting by Sandro Botticelli depicts the titular Roman goddess standing atop a giant scallop shell, being blown towards the shore by the wind god Zephyrus?

12. The most successful French competitor at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics, Léon Marchand won four individual gold medals in what sport?

13. Which mythical queen is credited with founding the ancient North African city-state of Carthage, and is best known for her role in Virgil’s Aeneid where she has a doomed love affair with the Trojan prince Aeneas?

14. The micro-state of Andorra is located in what major mountain range, that forms a natural boundary between France and Spain?

15. Portrayed on film by Gene Wilder in 1971 and Timothée Chalamet in 2023, which eccentric chocolatier is the owner of the titular business in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?

16. Jean Sibelius is regarded as the greatest classical composer from what European country, whose national epic poem, the Kalevala, inspired several of his famous pieces?

17. Also referring colloquially to any decisive assessment of a person or thing’s essential character, what “test” in chemistry uses a paper indicator that changes colour according to the acidity or alkalinity of the substance to which it is exposed?

18. “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” is the opening line of which of John Keats’s odes?

19. Which American singer rose to fame as a member of Motown girl-group The Supremes before a stellar solo career that included such hit singles as Love Hangover and Chain Reaction?

20. Which 2019 film was the first to feature Daniel Craig as private detective Benoit Blanc? The second film in the series was 2022’s Glass Onion, and a third instalment will be released later this year.

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Round 1 — ANSWERS

1. Pavlova (after the dancer Anna Pavlova)

2. Ghosts

3. Lima

4. Jennifer Aniston

5. Crater

6. Hallelujah

7. 25

8. Grigori Rasputin

9. The Observer

10. Prue Leith

11. The Birth of Venus

12. Swimming

13. Dido

14. Pyrenees

15. Willy Wonka

16. Finland

17. Litmus test

18. Ode to Autumn

19. Diana Ross

20. Knives Out

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Round 2 — The Fundamentals: Science

As a question-writer, and even when only writing flashcards for personal use, science is still the topic where I feel on shakiest ground. In general, when revising for quiz I make a real effort to get some sort of intellectual grasp on the new information I’m processing, but in many areas of science I’m conscious that much of my improvement in the last few years has been more a result of rote-learning and word association than of any real growth in understanding. That improvement has been real nonetheless, although my best science answers sometimes feel a little less honourable than my deep pulls on other topics. Just last week I managed to edge a very close-fought victory by remembering that the “Lamb shift” is something to do with electrons in a hydrogen atom having slightly different energy levels depending on what orbital they’re in; although my understanding of what orbitals are and why energy levels are relevant to them remains (to say the least) superficial. Indeed, a physicist would probably tell me that I barely understand what electrons are! I think my experience reflects the fact that even those of you who find the subject utterly baffling can still achieve a pretty high degree of effective quiz-competence on science. However, I’m still acutely aware of my own limitations, and I can only apologise to my scientifically-minded readers for any offensive over-simplifications in the following questions.

1. Which chemical element with the atomic number 74 has the highest melting point of all known elements, and is therefore often used to make light-bulb filaments?

2. Newton’s second law of motion is commonly represented F = ma (force equals mass times acceleration), but more properly it states that force is equal to the rate of change of what other quantity, usually represented by a lower-case letter p?

3. Derived from Latin words for “feather” and “foot”, what is the taxonomic name of the group of semi-aquatic mammals that comprises seals, sea lions, and walruses?

4. Rarely used in real-world computing because of its low efficiency, what very simple sorting algorithm compares each pair of adjacent items in a list, swapping them if they are in the incorrect order, and repeating the pass until no more swaps need to be made?

5. “Chocolate cysts” and “powder-burn lesions” are distinctive symptoms of what disease of the female reproductive system, in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows in areas outside the uterus, for example on the ovaries or fallopian tubes?

6. What letter of the Greek alphabet is used in computer science (in upper case) in the name of a variant of Big O notation that describes a function’s run-time with both upper and lower bounds, and in trigonometry (in lower case) as a variable representing an unknown angle?

7. Which 19th-century German scientist originated the famous basic statement of the second-law of thermodynamics, that heat cannot of itself pass from one body to a hotter body? He also coined the name “entropy” for the measure of a system’s disorder, which according to the second law can never decrease in an isolated system.

8. [PICTURE] From Greek words for “blanket” and “rock”, what word refers to the layer of unconsolidated mineral fragments that covers the bedrock of a celestial body, for example the dust on the surface of the moon?

9. In genetics, what repetitive sequences of DNA are located at the ends of linear chromosomes and protect the chromosomes from degradation? However, they get progressively shorter with repeated cell division and eventually disappear, which in large part is why we experience ageing.

10. Rendered obsolete in modern cars by fuel injection technology, what small component of an internal combustion engine mixes fuel and air in a controlled ratio to produce the combustible gas which is then burned to produce energy?

11. Catalysts are substances which increase the rate of chemical reactions. They function by lowering what quantity, which is the minimum amount of energy required for a reaction to take place?

12. In earth science, what four-letter word is used for a type of soil, ideal for agriculture, that is composed of a relatively even mixture of sand, silt, and clay?

13. Largely designed by Wernher von Braun, formerly the architect of the Nazi V2 rocket, what was the name of the three-stage launch vehicle operated by NASA from 1967 to 1973, which was vital to the Apollo moon landings and was also used to launch Skylab, America’s first space station?

14. Which Prague-born biochemist became in 1947 the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine? She and her husband discovered a namesake “cycle” in which excess lactic acid, produced by the breakdown of glucose in the muscles, is sent to the liver to be converted into more glucose which then returns to the muscles.

15. Resembling a massive cow parsley plant (sometimes up to 5 metres tall), what invasive species has been called Britain’s most dangerous plant due to its phototoxic sap that causes the skin to become extremely sensitive to sunlight, with the resulting burns sometimes taking years to heal?

16. Which groundbreaking doubly-eponymous experiment of 1952 sought to recreate conditions in which the first amino acids (the building blocks of life) might have developed out of simple organic compounds in the very early existence of Earth’s atmosphere?

17. What adjective describes the topmost group of vertebrae in the mammalian spinal column, located directly below the base of the skull? Humans have seven such vertebrae, as do all almost other mammals apart from sloths and manatees.

18. Responsible for the phenomenon of superconductivity, what name refers to a pair of electrons which, at very low temperatures, become bound together to form a single charge-carrying “quasiparticle”? Whereas single electrons are fermions, these pairs behave as bosons, meaning that, unlike electrons, they are not subject to the Pauli exclusion principle.

19. In geometry, what kind of curve represents the idealised shape of a chain or cable hanging freely from two fixed points?

20. Named after the Japanese-American meteorologist who introduced it in 1971, what is the most common internationally used scale for quantifying the intensity of tornadoes?

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Round 2 — ANSWERS

1. Tungsten

2. Momentum (an object’s momentum is equal to its mass multiplied by its velocity, and acceleration is the rate of change in velocity, so if you assume that an object’s mass will remain constant over time, you can rearrange this statement to the more familiar equation F = ma)

3. Pinniped

4. Bubble sort (or sinking sort)

5. Endometriosis

6. Theta

7. Rudolf Clausius

8. Regolith

9. Telomeres

10. Carburettor

11. Activation energy

12. Loam

13. Saturn V

14. Gerty Cori (the Cori cycle is alternatively known as the lactic acid cycle)

15. Giant hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum)

16. Miller-Urey experiment

17. Cervical

18. Cooper pair

19. Catenary

20. Fujita scale

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Round 3 — A Deeper Dive: Soaps

Science and soap operas are in a sense very similar topics (at least in terms of my quiz revision), as with both it feels very difficult to know where to start when you haven’t got in on the ground floor. It can seem impossible to get any sort of grasp on why one soap character is “notable” or “distinctive” without immersing yourself in decades of byzantine genealogy and lore. Like a lot of subjects however, part of the pleasure of my own incremental revision style has been the fact that more and more often the new soap-related facts I’m looking up will click together with other facts I’ve learned previously: like realising that the woman who pushed Barry off a cliff is the daughter of the guy standing outside Pat’s door with the spinning bow tie, and that he was the same guy who ran over Martine McCutcheon — basic stuff, I know, but I’ve been working from a true standing start here. There are still an awful lot of gaps in the jigsaw, but this is why we revise!

1. The show’s most impactful wedding since Scott and Charlene’s three decades earlier, the 2018 wedding of Neighbours characters David and Aaron was the first fictional gay wedding on Australian TV since the country legalised same-sex marriage the year before. The episode’s UK soundtrack appropriately included which song, with which the actors who played Scott and Charlene topped the UK charts in 1988?

2. The long-running Channel 4 soaps Brookside and Hollyoaks were both created by which scriptwriter, who had first come to fame as the creator of Grange Hill?

3. Which character on Coronation Street was played by Violet Carson from the show’s debut episode in 1960 until 1980? From her vantage point in the snug bar of The Rovers Return, drinking her customary milk stout, she was famous for critiquing the loose morals of her neighbours, most notably Pat Phoenix’s Elsie Tanner.

4. Filmed in Birmingham, the BBC daytime medical soap Doctors was set in a GP surgery in what fictional West Midlands town?

5. Adopted as a stray by Robbie Jackson in 1994, which Belgian Shepherd became the longest-running and best-loved pet character on EastEnders? He was famously threatened with euthanasia after biting Ian Beale on the buttocks, before finally dying from accidental cocoa poisoning in 2008.

6. A main character on Brookside in the early 1980s, and rare example of an upper-middle-class UK soap icon, glamorous yuppie accountant Heather Haversham was played by which Northern Irish actor, later known for her starring role in the early series of Silent Witness?

7. Replacing the short-lived Garnock Way, set in a Central Belt mining community, with the network suggesting that a more scenic depiction of Scotland would have wider appeal, what rural Scottish soap opera set in the loch-side village of Glendarroch aired on ITV between 1980 and 2003?

8. Actor Derek Thompson (whom I know best as Bob Hoskins’s useless lieutenant in The Long Good Friday) played what nurse for a peerless thirty-eight series of Casualty, from the show’s inception until his eventual departure in 2024?

9. Before her rise to superstardom on Desperate Housewives, Eva Longoria played Isabella Braña on what American TV soap? Set in Genoa City, this show famously featured a four-decade feud between matriarchs Jill Abbott and Katherine Chancellor.

10. One of the oldest businesses in Coronation Street is which newsagents, where Thelma Barlow’s beloved character Mavis Riley (later Wilton) worked behind the counter for decades, and which was badly damaged in the shocking tram-crash episode of 2010?

11. The 1986 hit single Anyone Can Fall in Love, which set lyrics to the iconic EastEnders theme tune, was performed by what actor who appeared on the show at the time as original Queen Vic landlady Angie Watts?

12. The BBC One comprehensive-school drama Waterloo Road was originally set in Greater Manchester and returned to the area when it was rebooted in 2023, but for the last three series of its original run its action abruptly moved to which real-life town in Inverclyde, Scotland?

13. One of the biggest shocks of all time on Radio 4 soap opera The Archers was the 2011 death of what long-running character, who fell from the roof of Lower Loxley Hall while taking down the New Year’s Day bunting?

14. In the US soap opera Dallas, what was the surname of the rival family of the Ewings? The show’s original plot-line concerning the fallout from Bobby Ewing’s surprise marriage to Pamela, a member of this family.

15. Introduced as a 3-year-old in 1997, which fan-favourite Coronation Street character, the more acerbic younger sister of extrovert Rosie, was at the centre of an acclaimed lesbian plot-line in 2010, falling in love with her best friend Sian Powers?

16. The first and so far only actor from Emmerdale to win the Outstanding Achievement prize at the British Soap Awards, which actor has played pub chef Marlon Dingle on Emmerdale since 1996 and garnered particular praise in 2022 for his depiction of Marlon’s life-altering stroke?

17. Greg Andersen, played by 1970s glam rocker Alvin Stardust, was the original landlord of what central pub in Hollyoaks, now managed by the show’s longest-serving character Tony Hutchinson?

18. Known for his repeated romantic disappointments and his multiple unflattering hairstyles, Neighbours character Jarrod Rebecchi was better known by what piscine nickname?

19. Which TV showrunner, who spent six years as a writer on Coronation Street, has cast several other Corrie alums in her more recent prestige dramas, notably Suranne Jones in Scott & Bailey and Gentleman Jack and Sarah Lancashire in Last Tango in Halifax and Happy Valley?

20. [PICTURE] Spawning one of the biggest memes to come out of a British soap opera in the social media age, what seemingly innocuous four words are furiously repeated by Zoe Lucker’s Vanessa Gold while tearing apart her own living room in a 2011 episode of EastEnders, after learning that her lover Max Branning is still involved with his ex-wife?

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Round 3 — ANSWERS

1. Especially For You (by Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan)

2. Phil Redmond

3. Ena Sharples

4. Letherbridge

5. Wellard

6. Amanda Burton

7. Take the High Road

8. Charlie Fairhead

9. The Young and the Restless

10. The Kabin

11. Anita Dobson

12. Greenock

13. Nigel Pargetter (from the length of the actor’s blood-curdling scream, Radio 4’s statistics programme More or Less calculated that the village hall would have to be an improbable 20 storeys high)

14. Barnes

15. Sophie Webster

16. Mark Charnock

17. The Dog in the Pond (often just called The Dog)

18. Toadfish (or Toadie)

19. Sally Wainwright

20. “Bubbly’s in the fridge”

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Round 4 — Themes and Trends: Highbrow/Lowbrow

Perhaps my favourite thing about general knowledge is that it takes the loftiest of academic learning and the most ephemeral depths of pop culture trivia, and not only puts them side-by-side on an equal footing but, in many cases, puts them in conversation with each other. Eclecticism is central to my own approach to quiz revision, and is equally central to my methodology in writing this Substack, partly because I think it’s the most effective way to gain a competitive advantage in quiz but more importantly because it’s fun! Finding a way to make a high-brow fact memorable for a low-brow reason, or vice versa (like the electromagnetic effect in last week’s Round 5 that shares its name with a viral lifestyle guru), is a pleasure that I’ll never tire of. Here are twenty more questions in that vein.

1. A major TikTok trend from 2023 involved women asking their male partners and friends how often they think about what academic subject?

2. In 2021, Jeangu Macrooy’s Birth of a New Age became the first Eurovision entry to feature lyrics in the creole language of Sranan Tongo, a common lingua franca in what South American country where Macrooy was born?

3. Including such chapters as ‘Make UK Company Law into your Anubis’, Business Secrets of the Pharaohs is a vanity-published treatise written by Mark Corrigan, one of the two lead characters in what British sitcom?

4. The founder of the luxury fashion house which bears his name, artisan trunk-maker Louis Vuitton got his big break in the 1850s thanks to the patronage of Empress Eugénie de Montijo, the wife of which French monarch who established the Second Empire?

5. The name of which Classic Hollywood actress appears in the title of the first published novel by Argentine author Manuel Puig? This actress played the titular femme fatale in 1946’s Gilda and co-starred with her then husband Orson Welles in 1947’s The Lady from Shanghai.

6. The train journey that brought Vladimir Lenin from his exile in Switzerland to St Petersburg in April 1917 inspired the lyrics “from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station” in what 1984 Pet Shop Boys single?

7. Including the Mordor Macula, the Oz Terra, and the Nostromo Chasma, which largest moon of the dwarf planet Pluto has several geographical features named after locations from sci-fi and fantasy media?

8. Which legendary 7-foot-1 centre is known to basketball fans as the only NBA player ever to score 100 points in a single game, and is also known to political philosophy fans as the subject of an illustrative argument in Robert Nozick’s libertarian manifesto Anarchy, State, and Utopia?

9. Referring to the spherical clusters formed by molecules with hydrophilic “heads” and hydrophobic “tails” aggregating in an aqueous solution, what adjective word precedes “water” in the name of a popular skincare product used to gently remove oil and make-up from the face?

10. The Dora Milaje, the elite all-female security force of the Kingdom of Wakanda in the Marvel comics, were modelled on the Mino or “Amazons” of what historical West African kingdom centred in present-day Benin?

11. Familiar to UK audiences thanks to its use in adverts for British Airways, the ‘Flower Duet’ is an aria from which 1883 opera by Léo Delibes, where it is sung by the titular Indian priestess and her servant Mallika?

12. The iconic blank cover of The Beatles’ 1968 self-titled album, known as The White Album, was designed by what British artist whose 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing is often described as the first masterpiece of pop art?

13. Investigative journalist Jade accumulates photographic evidence of an alien conspiracy in what 2003 action-adventure video game, which shares its title with a major work of 19th-century philosophy?

14. [PICTURE] Until his 2022 death, what Nobel-winning author of novels including The Time of the Hero and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter was in a relationship with socialite Isabel Preysler, the mother of pop star Enrique Iglesias?

15. A passage from Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 (From the New World) is heavily sampled in the track Same Old Thing by which hip-hop act, appearing on their 2002 debut album Original Pirate Material?

16. The exclave region of Cabinda, a disputed province of Angola, is often asked about in academic quiz in the context of the separatist insurgency that has been ongoing there since 1975. On a wholly different note, the most famous person born in Cabinda is what French midfielder, who has played for Real Madrid since his teenage transfer from Rennes in 2021?

17. Sharing her name with the heroine of an early animated film by Studio Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki, which character in Homer’s Odyssey rescues the hero after a shipwreck and brings him to the palace of her father King Alcinous, where he tells the story of his earlier adventures?

18. Containing Russia’s southernmost point, what ethnically diverse Russian republic in the Caucasus is known for producing several of the world’s best MMA fighters, including current UFC lightweight champion Islam Makhachev?

19. Starring Sarah Michelle Gellar as Machiavellian queen bee Kathryn and Ryan Philippe as her narcissistic step-brother Sebastian, what ’90s teen drama was a modern re-telling of the 18th-century epistolary novel Les liaisons dangereuses?

20. A main reason why seared steaks and toasted marshmallows taste especially delicious, what eponymous chemical reaction occurs when amino acids and reducing sugars are heated, resulting in both browning and the development of complex flavours and aromas?

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Round 4 — ANSWERS

1. The Roman Empire

2. Suriname (Macrooy represented the Netherlands — Suriname is a former Dutch colony, where Dutch remains the official language)

3. Peep Show

4. Napoleon III

5. Rita Hayworth (the novel was titled Betrayed by Rita Hayworth)

6. West End Girls

7. Charon

8. Wilt Chamberlain (aka Wilt the Stilt)

9. Micellar water

10. Dahomey

11. Lakmé

12. Richard Hamilton

13. Beyond Good and Evil (also the name of a 1886 work by Friedrich Nietzsche)

14. Mario Vargas Llosa

15. The Streets

16. Eduardo Camavinga

17. Nausicaä (the film is 1984’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind)

18. Dagestan

19. Cruel Intentions

20. Maillard reaction

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Round 5 — No Pain, No Gain

1. Easily confused with the name of a seabird, what word refers in typography to the sideways-pointing chevron-shaped quotation marks used in many non-English languages to indicate speech, «comme ça»?

2. Which golf club in Minnesota hosted the US Open for the first time in 1970 and received scathing reviews after only seven competitors managed to break 75 on the first day, with Tony Jacklin the only player to thrive in the harsh conditions? Its reputation recovered however, and it hosted several more major tournaments, as well as the 2016 Ryder Cup.

3. [PICTURE] First coming to fame as the creator of humorous webcomic Hark! A Vagrant, which Canadian cartoonist wrote the award-winning 2022 graphic novel Ducks, an environmentalist memoir based on her own experiences of working in the oil fields of Alberta?

4. Dubbed “the Venice of the Pacific” and with a name meaning “the spaces between”, what ruined megalithic city and UNESCO World Heritage Site on the island of Pohnpei in Micronesia is built across more than a hundred small artificial islets linked by a network of canals?

5. Which Atlanta-born rapper, a pioneer of the rage sub-genre, adopted the persona of a vampire rock star on his critically acclaimed 2022 album Whole Lotta Red and collaborated with The Weeknd on the song Rather Lie which reached the UK top 10 in March of this year?

6. The infant Mary, Queen of Scots was smuggled to France in 1547 in the wake of Scotland’s catastrophic defeat by the English army at which battle, fought near Musselburgh? This was the most famous engagement of the so-called Rough Wooing, Henry VIII’s campaign to force a marriage between Mary and his son Edward, and was the last pitched battle between Scotland and England before the 1603 Union of the Crowns.

7. In which 1937 melodrama did Barbara Stanwyck play the titular mill-worker’s daughter who sets out to build a better life for her own child? It is perhaps best known for its tear-jerking finale where Stanwyck watches her daughter’s society wedding through a window from the street.

8. Considered one of the greatest amateur boxers of all time, which Cuban heavyweight won three consecutive Olympic gold medals between 1992 and 2000, and famously turned down several multi-million-dollar offers to defect from Cuba for a bout against Mike Tyson?

9. Which legendary King of Dyfed is the only character to appear in all four branches of the Mabonogion, the primary compendium of Welsh myth? As a child, his mother Rhiannon’s maids carelessly lost him, and bizarrely attempted to frame Rhiannon for having eaten him.

10. If you are a keen podcast listener, you will surely have heard adverts for what website-building platform, founded as a blog-hosting site in 2003 although it has expanded exponentially in the last decade? It now owns the app Unfold, which provides free templates for social media content.

11. One of the most memorable temporary installations in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall gallery, the 2007 work Shibboleth consisted of a 548-foot-long crack in the hall’s floor, and was created by what Colombian artist?

12. Described by Philip Roth as “the best English novel since the war”, what 1986 novel by John le Carré depicted the fracturing loyalties of British intelligence officer Magnus Pym? The character of Magnus’s charismatic con-man father was directly based on the author’s own father.

13. Over four times the size of nearby Capri, which Italian island is the largest in the Bay of Naples, and was famously the home of English composer William Walton for the last three decades of his life?

14. Making his film debut as Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which character actor played Doc Cochran in HBO’s Deadwood and Grima Wormtongue in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as voicing the possessed doll Chucky in the Child’s Play franchise?

15. With its lyrics depicting a confrontation between two groups of Mardi Gras revellers, what much-covered traditional New Orleans song first gained global attention in a version by The Dixie Cups in 1965?

16. What coastal hamlet in North Yorkshire is the namesake site of the UK’s deepest mine, stretching nearly a mile below ground level? Its subterranean tunnels are home to an important Underground Laboratory and have been used to simulate the conditions on the surface of Mars.

17. What 2024 psychological horror movie directed by Jane Schoenbrun centred on two misfit teenagers in the mid-’90s who become obsessed with a supernatural teen drama serial called The Pink Opaque?

18. The dedicatee of Haydn’s popular Trumpet Concerto, which 18th-century virtuoso was the first to invent a trumpet that was capable of playing chromatically, thanks to his addition of keys?

19. Ali, the fourth leader of the Rashidun Caliphate and first Shia imam, was assassinated in 661 by a follower of what breakaway Islamic sect, who insisted that piety alone qualified an individual for leadership, and that any Muslim (even a Caliph) who sinned against god could be treated as a nonbeliever? This sect was the ancestor of the less activist Ibadi school, which is now the majority religious community of Oman.

20. Which British musician is currently married to American actress Grace Gummer, and is therefore the son-in-law of Meryl Streep?

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Round 5 — ANSWERS

1. Guillemet

2. Hazeltine National

3. Kate Beaton

4. Nan Madol

5. Playboi Carti (born Jordan Terrell Carter)

6. Battle of Pinkie (or Pinkie Cleugh)

7. Stella Dallas

8. Félix Savón

9. Pryderi

10. Squarespace

11. Doris Salcedo

12. A Perfect Spy

13. Ischia

14. Brad Dourif

15. Iko Iko

16. Boulby

17. I Saw the TV Glow

18. Anton Weidinger

19. Kharijite

20. Mark Ronson

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And that’s your lot. Hope you had fun. Feel free to share your best gets and most annoying misses in the comments. I’ll see you next weekend, but for now I’ll leave you with five minutes of Violet Carson and Pat Phoenix absolutely emptying the tank.