ANSWERS

1) B. A sausage. Pamela Lyndon Travers had spent 20 years refusing to sell the movie rights to Walt Disney. Having finally relented, she sat through the premiere — to which she had originally not been invited — in tears.

She said later: ‘It’s as though they took a sausage, threw away the contents and filled the skin with their own ideas far from the original substance.’

After reading the book, Francis Macnamara, an Irish poet with whom Travers was in love, said: ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Mary Poppins, with her cool, green core of sex, has me enthralled for ever.’ 2) B. It contained Walt Disney’s favourite song. WALT loved Feed The Birds so much that he got its songwriters, the Sherman Brothers, to perform it every Friday. 3) True. On her appearance in 1977, she chose only spoken-word tracks — seven poems and one Shakespeare speech — saying: ‘If you put me on a desert island, I would want, above all things, to hear the human voice.’ 4) A. That no American writers would be involved. In 1993, Travers agreed to allow a stage version, as long as only english writers worked on it and no American involved in the original film had a hand in it. 5) C. His vocal coach was Irish. Van Dyke said: ‘His name was Pat O’Malley and he didn’t do an accent any better than I did.’ 6) False. The ‘nonsense word’, used to express ‘excited approbation’, is in the OeD. However, the definition’s first citation comes from a newspaper report in 1931 — 33 years before it was used in the Disney film.