quizzes – Maddie Grigg

For just shy of a year, I’ve been doing a daily pop quiz online called Popquizza.

I can’t be bothered with Wordle (sorry!) and Sudoko brings me out in a rash (maths?) but give me ten random questions on pop music and it gets the old brain cogs whirring every morning.

Depending on the era, I usually manage to do reasonably well, my pop music knowledge informed by being the youngest of five and the child of parents who liked anything from the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Gustav Holst’s The Planets to Joan Baez and Elias and his Zig-Zag Jive Flutes.

In our house, it was anything from The Everly Brothers, Lou Reed, Somerset folk songs and Steely Dan, depending on the sibling.

And then I came along, loved all of it and added my own punk and ska twist and then, latterly, techno and electronica.

So when a friend put me on to the daily quiz, it seemed like a good idea at the time. But I realise now that I have whole gaps in my pop music knowledge, which corresponds with being a grown-up and not caring very much.

I’ve had a few ten out of tens but, for some unknown reason, I keep getting a five or, as I like to say ‘foive’ in honour of Janice Nicholls who said famously ‘oi’ll give it foive’ on Thank Your Lucky Stars, a remark which apparently catapulted the 16-year-old Black Country clerk to fame.

According toNostalgiacentral.com, she remained a regular on Thank Your Lucky Stars for three years, and her phrase entered British colloquial speech.

The show concluded in the summer of 1966, when I was coming up to foive. I don’t even remember it. But clearly it entered my family’s colloquial speech, because we’re still saying it now.