WHYARE SCOTS THE TV QUIZ KINGS?

HE is the Scot who gave the right answer to all 15 of his questions on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? – even if he was not quite brave enough to back his instincts on the £1million poser.

Retired GP Andrew Townsley, from Glasgow, chose not to play the jackpot question on the high-tension television quiz because a wrong answer would have cost him £436,000.

Yet the 53-year-old has emerged as his nation’s most successful contestant on the show after reaching the £125,000 mark without using any lifelines.

Dr Townsley, who has progressive multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair, said he was torn between two possible answers for the final question: In the history of motorsport, which of these iconic races was held first? A: Le Mans 24 Hours, B: Monaco Grand Prix, C: Indy 500, or D: Isle of Man TT.

But, having refused to play the question, he said that if he were feeling braver he would have gone for option D. Agonisingly, that was the correct answer.

The father of two’s £500,000 win is the latest in a string of quizzing triumphs which suggests that Scotland punches well above its weight in the general knowledge stakes.

The current Mastermind champion, for example, is an Edinburgh pub quizmaster; a Scottish team last year pulled off the rare coup of wresting the University Challenge prize from Oxbridge and annual quizzing contests such as Channel 4’s Fifteen to One and BBC Radio 4’s Brain of Britain have in recent years seen a slew of Scottish winners.

Where, then, does the suddenly-much-richer Dr Townsley figure in Scotland’s quizzing hall of fame? You decide.

Claire Scott

BLOCKBUSTERS CHAMPION OF CHAMPIONS

ONLY 16 when she first appeared on the teatime show in 1984, the pupil from St Stephen’s High, in Port Glasgow, Renfrewshire, was written off by many as easy meat for the fee-paying school whizzes who tended to shine on Blockbusters.

She remembered: ‘We’re talking about pupils from private schools from Surrey and places like that. To be honest, there were a few I was a bit nervous of who seemed a bit snotty.’

She decided to ignore them and focus on doing herself justice, which she did in spades. The teenager won a maximum of five Gold Runs – securing prizes including a safari in Kenya and hi-fi stacks – and proved such a fearsome intellect that she was invited back for a one-off Blockbusters Champions series in 1989. She racked up another maximum five Gold Runs before retiring undefeated.

Fittingly, Mrs Scott went on to become a primary school teacher, sharing her hard-won knowledge with new generations.

Barry Simmons

EGGHEAD, FORMER BRAIN OF BRITAIN AND PROFESSIONAL GAME SHOW CONTESTANT

EDINBURGH-born Mr Simmons is one of a growing band of quizzers intent on amassing honours from multiple game shows.

He scooped £64,000 on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, was a semi-finalist on Mastermind, was crowned Brain of Britain in 2012 and, by the following year, was ranked number three quizzer in the world.

That may be some consolation for one of the UK’s best-known quizzers, Shaun Wallace – aka The Dark Destroyer on ITV’s The Chase – who was defeated by Simmons in the inaugural series of BBC2’s Are You An Egghead?

Simmons’s victory gave him a regular berth on the show Eggheads, which proved controversial when, in 2012, he reached the final of Brain of Britain. Should ‘professional quizzers’ really be eligible for such prizes? The BBC saw no reason why not – and Simmons duly won.

The 71-year-old said of his Eggheads role: ‘It’s the best job in British quizzing and to get paid for doing something you love is just the icing on the cake. But I have to admit I hate losing.’

Edinburgh University

UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE CHAMPIONS 2019

NOT since the days when Bamber Gascoigne occupied the quizmaster’s chair had a Scottish university gone all the way in the annual academic slugfest.

St Andrews University had defeated University College, Oxford in 1982 and unfancied Dundee University took the honours the following year but since then – throughout Jeremy Paxman’s

25-year tenure in fact – no team from a Sottish seat of learning had even reached the final.

All that changed last year when the Edinburgh team became the first non-Oxbridge finalists since 2013. Admittedly the team, whose mascot was Greyfriars Bobby, was not entirely Scottish as names such as Max Fitz-James and Marco Malusa might suggest.

But Robbie Campbell Hewson, who answered a key question to put his team into an unassailable lead, is Edinburgh born and bred.

Team captain Mr Fitz-James said: ‘The best training was watching past episodes and doing it together as a team, so we would get together every Monday and watch past episodes, pause and try to answer the questions before the team.’

Mike Clark

BRAIN OF BRITAIN 2016

AFTER winning the coveted title at the age of 54, Mr Clark, from Montrose, Angus, admitted that the popular radio quiz may have saved his life.

A year earlier the lorry driver had been frittering away his time and money in pubs and losing confidence in his abilities by the day.

Certainly, his two semi-finalist appearances on Mastermind and last-six achievement on Channel 4’s Fifteen to One seemed like distant memories by then.

‘I was pretty suicidal at one point,’ he confessed. ‘I was in a vicious circle. I wasn’t able to afford to do anything because I was spending too much money in the pubs. I had a lack of confidence and drinking doesn’t really help that.’

Yet within eight months of cutting out the pub visits he was back to his quizzing best.

It was his knowledge of matters as diverse as jazz music and herring that proved decisive on the day. His love of Elvis Presley helped, too.

He said: ‘I got a dreaded classical music question. The answer was Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman

Winning ways: Dr Townsley on Millionaire, left, and Claire Scott on Blockbusters, above but I only knew it because it was used as a tune in one of Elvis’s films, G.I. Blues.’

Dave McBryan

MASTERMIND CHAMPION 2020, FIFTEEN TO ONE CHAMPION 2014

ORIGINALLY from Dublin, Mr McBryan came to Edinburgh as a student in his teenage years and never left.

Long before this year’s Mastermind triumph – in which a fictional universe created by filmmaker Kevin Smith was his specialist subject – he was a force to be reckoned with in the quizzing and puzzling firmament.

He makes his living as a writer and presenter of pub quizzes, had won Fifteen to One on Channel 4 and, in 2016, was one of only three people out of tens of thousands to come anywhere close to solving a cryptography challenge set by GCHQ director Robert Hannigan in a Christmas card.

It involved knowledge of subjects as diverse as phonetics, semaphore, French, snooker and The Lord of the Rings.

Mr McBryan, 46, who has been compiling pub quizzes for a quarter of a century, said the Mastermind final was a ‘nerve-wracking affair’ but that, in quizzing circles, winning it did not carry the kudos of a victory, say, in the European or World quiz championships.

He said: ‘It’s still one of the most prestigious TV quizzes but, no, it’s not the pinnacle of quizzes.’

Hamish Cameron

MASTERMIND’S MOST DOGGED CONTESTANT

IN all, he appeared on Mastermind 17 times – the last occasion screened days after he passed away last year.

The Elgin IT manager’s debut in the black chair came in 1990 when Magnus Magnusson was the host and, over the next 28 years, there were seven more tilts at the coveted glass bowl.

In all but one of those he made the semi-final and he was a finalist twice – in 2014 and 2019.

Mr Cameron finished fourth in his last Mastermind campaign, which was recorded in November 2018, a month before he was diagnosed with cancer.

He died at 72 early last summer and his funeral was held hours before the show was broadcast.

The BBC had planned to postpone the episode but Mr Cameron’s family urged the Corporation to air it.

His son Niall said: ‘When he did the Mastermind final, he said, “If I am not here, make sure the programme still goes out”.

‘Hamish wouldn’t want us to be sad but to find the positives.’