HAMPTON DOUBLEDAY

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THERE must be 10 TV game shows a week where they pause for an agonising 20 seconds to increase tension before announcing a result. With an average of 3 million viewers per show that’s 600 million seconds or 7,000 days wasted each week just waiting to hear which tedious arsehole has won something that doesn’t matter to anyone else. No wonder we have a productivity problem in the UK.

Wallaby Pearson-Smith, Hollywood ⬜

READING Paul Emerson’s letter (Letterbocks, Viz 332) about his wife and her use of the expression ‘baked beans’ rather than just ‘beans’, reminded me of that time we were watching an episode of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and the £250,000 question was “What kind of beans are typically used for baked beans?”. I immediately and correctly went for haricot. I was asked how I knew that, and there was a simple explanation – ‘haricot’ is an anagram of ‘chariot,’ so I just imagine Charlton Heston letting rip with a loud fart, caused by eating too many beans, during the chariot race scene in 1959 epic Ben Hur.

D Roche, Dublin ⬜

WITH reference to D Roche’s letter (above). This is a good – but not foolproof – way of remembering that baked beans are made from haricot beans. Charlton Heston also starred as the orchestra leader Lionel Evans in the war film Counterpoint, and if you imagine him farting whilst conducting the orchestra and remember that the word ‘point’ from the title is an anagram of ‘pinto’, you get completely the wrong type of bean.

Oxter Lysk, Deal ⬜

I AM really enjoying the English version of Jeopardy on ITV, but it has to be said that the standard of contestant is appalling. There’s been a lad on it this week who spent the entire show butting in to ask the quizmaster Stephen Fry who people were and what things are … and he ended up winning! It’s one thing to have the cheek to enter a quiz show with such poor general knowledge, but it says a lot more about the other contestants who couldn’t even beat him.

Martyn Oakley, Hessle