Who What Where ?

Our fun weekly quiz in which we ask you to figure out people, places and things in the news...

WHAT AM I?

■ Originally made from a plant which shares my name, I was so hallowed in ancient Egypt that only the pharaohs were allowed to eat me. Romans and Greeks used me to treat sore throats, making sweetened blobs to help the medicine go down. M Althaiophobia is a morbid fear of me.

■ Astronauts have used me as a nose plug.

■ Americans collectively devour about 40,000 tons of me every year – equivalent to 3,000 double-decker buses in weight. They eat me on sweet potatoes, squished between chocolate and crackers or even, horrifyingly, in Waldorf salad.

■ I’m usually a sweet, but last week a judge ruled that if I’m extra large, I count as a ‘recipe ingredient’, so not liable for VAT.

WHO AM I?

■ I went into acting after imagining myself winning an Oscar during a malaria-induced hallucination. I caught the disease while volunteering in rural Mozambique aged 19.

■ I used to work in my local cinema, even after my first movie came out. Customers would watch me on the silver screen, then see me sweep up the rubbish.

■ My parents had a penchant for odd names: my siblings are called Liberty, Annachi and Ryot. At high school – where I scored 99.3 per cent on my exams, by the way – I went by my middle name, Melanie.

■ I used to have my own range of T-shirts, branded Fat Mandi, and am skilled with nunchucks.

■ I was flatmates with comedian Matt Lucas, left, both in real life and in my movie breakthrough.

But I called Sacha Baron Cohen creepy in my new memoir, and the details were blacked-out after the Borat star complained they were defamatory.

WHERE AM I?

■ There is a 4mph speed limit here. That’s probably because there are no cars.

■ Every year my mayor symbolically marries the sea by throwing a gold ring into it, a tradition going back more than a millennium.

■ Writer Truman Capote said I was ‘like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go’.

■ I used to be my own country, with an empire stretching around the Adriatic, and have my own language. It gave us the word ‘ciao’ – a shortened form of ‘schiavo vostro’, or ‘[I am] your slave’. I also gave the world Casanova, Marco Polo, left, and Canaletto.

■ I have almost as many canals as Birmingham but am sinking by two millimetres a year. And last week I introduced a €5 entrance fee to day-trippers.