Popmaster

Synopsis

Long-running Ken Bruce pop music quiz on Radio 2, and easily the best thing on in daytime on that station.

Two contestants face ten questions each, highest score on the day wins. The scoring was originally 3 points for a correct answer and 1 for a partially-correct answer; later a "bonus" question was introduced whereby the contestant chose a number from 1 to 10 and when that question came up it was worth double points.

Relaunched as "New Popmaster" in 2002(?) with a new "specialist subjects" twist whereby three of the questions are on a subject selected from a choice of two (originally three) and worth double points. In the early days there were often quite specific subjects (on a particular artist or genre) in the selection; nowadays these are rarer and the subjects tend to be pretty wide-ranging, like songs with colours in the title, "female singers" (so that'll be about half of all solo artists ever, then) and the much-hated "Name the Year".

The quiz was run in two parts (at 10.25 and 11.15) for several years but is now back to its original all-in-one form (indeed, practically a show within a show) at around 10.30. The last major tweak (in January 2005) was to have the two contestants on air simultaneously, answering alternate questions, with unanswered questions passed over to the other contestant for a bonus, which only lasted a week or two before being given up as A Really Bad Idea. (This format was briefly revived for the Children In Need Celebrity Popmaster week in November 2006.)

Winners go through to endgame Three In Ten, naming three hits by a given group or artist in ten seconds. This is very much pot luck - sometimes it'll be someone like the Rolling Stones or Status Quo, but sometimes it's a real stinker like Shalamar or Go West, where you think "have they even had three hits?". Top prize is a DAB radio worth about £100, which isn't bad for a daily phone-in, winners who don't name three in ten get an mp4 player. Previous consolation prizes included the "flipper radio" between May 2007 and October 2009, and before that the mysterious "space radio". Occasionally someone still asks for an inflatable chair, even though that particular consolation prize hasn't been given away in years and years.

The year's top scorers (which for a while was restricted to maximum scorers only, even if that was as few as five players as it was in 2010, though 2012 saw so few maxima that the rule had to be abandoned to have any sort of contest at all) come back in December for Champions League Popmaster, with some posh hi-fi equipment (changed to an electronic tablet in 2014) for the overall champ.

Key moments

We're sure people have scored zero in the past, but nowadays Ken will always give enough clues to the last question to ensure that they will get three points. This can often get so hilariously long-winded that it would probably have been kinder to just let them score zero.

The infamous April Fool's Day edition, when fellow R2 jocks Richard Allinson and Lynn Parsons tricked Ken by posing as genuine contestants, made ridiculous "guesses" and ended up locked in a never-ending tie-break.

The incredibly cheesy jingle that for a while was played when players successfully completed Three In Ten. We miss that.

During a period from July 2007 to January 2008 when all BBC phone-in quizzes were suspended due to mismanagement and defrauding the public, Popmaster was played using celebrity contestants. The first (and indeed, only) celeb to score maximum points was Richard Drummie from the aforementioned Go West - and what made this particularly impressive is that he did it without the outrageous giveaway clues Ken usually dished out to the celebrity players. For some obscure reason, people on the BBC staff were not allowed to appear but those who worked for the corporation as freelancers could - so Charles Nove was roped in as a contestant, but fellow R2 newsreader Fran Godfrey was barred.

Rob Brydon's one-off bank holiday appearance as stand-in host was notable for Brydon conducting the quiz in an uncanny and hilarious impersonation of Ken Bruce. Bruce had to put up with jokes about this for months afterwards, and even other stand-ins would get jokey emails from listeners suggesting that they (the stand-ins) were really just Brydon in disguise! Brydon appeared "as" Bruce again for April Fools Day 2011.

Inventor

Ken Bruce, Colin Martin and Phil Swern

Catchphrases

"One year out!" A good example of a catchphrase that emerged naturally rather than being deliberately written as a catchphrase. It now appears on the T-shirts they give out as consolation prizes.

Trivia

The music bed for the quiz lasts seven minutes and twenty-eight seconds. Or at least, the 2002-8 version did. They introduced a new music bed and jingles in January 2008 to coincide with the return of the regular non-celeb version. The music was changed again (the new version is fully orchestrated, no less!) as part of a general refresh of Radio 2's jingle package on 16 July 2012.

We dimly recall that a team version was tried out at least once, back in the 1990s.

Web links

Popmaster online game

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