Q: What inspired Mastermind’s sinister black chair and dazzling spotlight?
A: The terrifying Gestapo interrogation suffered by its creator
THE nightmares were always the same, even decades after BBC producer Bill Wright was freed from a prisoner-ofwar camp. In these dark dreams he was always seated, a bright light blazing in his face, unable to see his interrogator in the blackness beyond.
he answered every question in the same stubborn and courageous way, giving the Nazi secret police no information except his name, rank and serial number: ‘Wright W. h., Flight Sergeant, No 1383566’.
More than 25 years later, Wright turned that traumatic experience into the basis of arguably the most iconic quiz show in British TV history. The terrifying chair, the dazzling light and the merciless questioning are an integral part of the show he created, Mastermind.
And when current host Clive Myrie confronts another batch of quiz conscripts tonight on BBC2, he will demand their name, occupation and specialist subject — a deliberate echo of ‘name, rank and serial number’.
This much, Mastermind devotees may already know.
But the full facts of Bill Wright’s wartime heroics, his repeated escapes from death and the extraordinary television career that followed have never been revealed — perhaps because the BBC’s shameful treatment of this remarkable man is something the corporation would prefer to forget.
In the autumn of 1940, the early days of the Blitz, Wright was a 17- year- old messenger boy at Broadcasting house in London, where he had worked since leaving school at 14.
On October 15, just after 8pm, the building was hit by a delayed-action 500lb bomb, which crashed through the window of the switchboard on the seventh floor and came to rest two storeys down, in the music library.
WITH staff intent on continuing their radio broadcasts, many of them refused to evacuate. An hour later, during the nine o’clock news, listeners heard the bomb explode. Six people, three of them women, were killed, and a seventh died from his injuries.
Wright and his friend Doug Radcliffe watched as the bodies were brought out. The two teenagers made a pact to join up and fight, as soon as they could, though neither was old enough to volunteer. They chose the RAF because, as Radcliffe recalled years later, they ‘wanted to fly, simple as that’.
Initially, they were told to wait until they turned 18. ‘But when we said we worked at the BBC,’ Radcliffe added, ‘they immediately thought “Wireless!” They signed us up, even though we didn’t know anything about radios.’
After training as wireless operators, at first they were stationed as ground crew.
When they pleaded to be allowed to undertake bombing missions, Radcliffe’s mother was horrified — the RAF’s night raids over Germany were among the most dangerous missions of the war.
Many planes failed to return and those who were not killed were at risk of capture, interrogation and torture by the German secret state police — the Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo.
The more senior the rank of captured airmen, the better their chances of humane treatment. Before they were allowed to fly, Wright and Radcliffe retrained as air gunners, which meant promotion to sergeant.
The friends were assigned to depleted Canadian units, to make up numbers.
Radcliffe was sent to North Africa, Wright to North Yorkshire — eight miles beyond York at east Moor airfield, where he joined 429 Bison Squadron.
The tally of losses suffered by Bison Squadron is chilling. Between their arrival at east Moor in January 1943 and the end of the war in 1945, more than 70 aircraft failed to return from sorties, and 404 aircrew were killed — though 322 of these were never found. Another 23 were taken prisoner.
Wright returned to wireless operator duties. ‘You could tell a wireless operator by looking at his boots,’ Radcliffe remembered. ‘The heating duct for the cockpit came out by your left foot, and it would partly melt the rubber sole of your boot. It meant you were always roasting, while the rear gunner would be freezing.’
Six weeks after arriving, in April 1943, Wright and his crew had a narrow escape when, on an operation against targets in Dusseldorf, the tail of their Wellington hZ470 was hit by flak.
They managed to struggle home but, on the night of June 21, the shortest of the year, they weren’t so lucky.
This time, they were heading to Krefeld in the Rhineland but, over the border of Belgium and the Netherlands, they were forced to jettison their 4,000lb bomb and crash-land. It’s likely they had been hit again by anti-aircraft fire, but Luftwaffe fighter ace
Werner Baake claimed credit for forcing the Wellington down.
The bomb aimer, Sgt hugh holmes, and the air gunner, Flight Officer Douglas Milne, were killed.
Warrant Officer edward eames, the pilot, and Pilot Officer eric Lapham, the navigator, escaped the plane crash and were able to make their way back to Britain with the assistance of the underground resistance.
Wright, who was the wireless operator, took shelter at a nearby farmhouse, but was captured and sent for interrogation at the Luftwaffe’s western evaluation station at Oberursel, outside Frankfurt.
here, he was subjected to standard Gestapo interrogation, starting with three days of solitary confinement. Then the questioning began. Lights burning in his face, voices screaming in his ears, Wright steadfastly refused to divulge anything more than his name, rank and number.
The inquisitors, led by Corporal hanns Scharff, a master of psychological torture, threatened him with execution as a spy if he didn’t talk. No ordinary airman would hold out, they said — his silence only proved that he was hiding secret information.
SCHARFF’S favourite method was to brag about how much he already knew about an airman’s squadron, down to the pubs where they drank and the name of the wing commander’s dog.
This trick was designed to make prisoners feel their sacrifice in staying silent was futile — especially if they thought what they knew would be of no value to the Nazis anyway. They told what little they could . . . such as the names of pubs and dogs.
It was with precisely this technique that Scharff was able to seem omniscient, and to glean genuinely valuable information from prisoners, such as background operational data.
After eight days with little sleep and expecting death at any moment, Wright was sent to the remote Stalag 357 in Torun, Poland, known as ‘Kopernikus’.
Brutally overcrowded with some 10,000 Allied prisoners of war, including 3,000 airmen, this camp between Warsaw and Gdansk was
evacuated in 1944 as Stalin’s red Army advanced towards the German border.
A series of forced marches and murderous train journeys ensued, as the prisoners were herded west. Conditions in the railway trucks were lethally unsanitary. Many died of dehydration, disease or malnutrition. On foot, men supported each other to avoid dying where they fell.
One survivor told how his best friend tried to leave the road to forage for food, and was shot dead by a German guard for ‘attempting to escape’.
The airmen dealt out summary justice to the Nazi when their column was found and liberated by Allied troops.
Like many others who lived through such wartime horrors, Bill Wright rarely spoke of his experiences.
he returned to the BBC and rose to become a producer, launching a football quiz after england’s World Cup triumph in 1966. Called Quiz Ball, it ran for six years.
Inspired by Wright’s ordeal at the hands of the Gestapo, Mastermind was intended as a riposte to ITV’s popular University Challenge.
When it launched in late 1972, the BBC was dubious at first: executives consigned it to a late-night slot, concerned the questions were too obscure and intellectual for a mainstream audience.
BUTa few months later, another crisis arose. The sex comedy Casanova ’73, starring Leslie Phillips as a hapless lothario, was hit by a barrage of complaints that it was too racy for early evening viewing.
Mastermind replaced Casanova ’73 in the schedules and won an instant audience of more than ten million.
By the mid-1980s, that had risen to 15 million. But Bill Wright had little time to relish his triumph. Stricken with motor neurone disease, he died aged 68 in 1980.
his widow, Sheila, who worked as a question-setter on the show, said that despite inventing one of the most popular formats ever screened, he never benefited financially.
‘he was a staff member of the BBC, not a freelance,’ she said. ‘As such, there was no extra payment for having thought up the programme.
‘he was totally devoted to the BBC and accepted the way it worked. But, of course, it crossed his mind that, had he devised it for ITV, he would probably have become very rich,’ she added.
So it remained a jewel of the BBC schedule. But how many of the millions of viewers who racked their brains over the questions knew it had been inspired by the brutal tactics that never quite broke Bill Wright in a Gestapo cell.