The Dabbler’s Round Blogworld Quiz #23: The Solution

Quiz genius Adelephant triumphs again! Well done to Worm also, and thanks to Jonathan Law for a great quiz. Click continue for the full answer

Earlier Jonathan Law posed our latest RB Quiz question, namely…

What connects a Shakespeare play with a capacity audience; the man who rode Tony the Wonder Horse; the naked lady of Henly’s Corner and a nightclub dancer from Harlem USA; Claireece P. and a medley-playing pianist named, but not usually called, Gladys; and Sir Ben Kingsley’s first meal of the day?

The overall answer connects with Bin Laden’s giant clock and “the band the Beatles could have been”.

And the answer is… Bingo and bing calls!

The ‘Shakespeare play’ is not a play by Shakespeare but Edward Bond’s typically upbeat drama about the last days of the Bard, Bingo (1973). In Bond’s version, Shakespeare dies in despair, convinced that his life’s work has been of no value because his plays did nothing to change the Elizabethan social order. A ‘capacity audience’ is a full house, the US name for the game we know as Bingo. 

Tony the Wonder Horse was ridden by one of the first Hollywood Cowboys, silent star Tom Mix. Apart from making well over 300 films, many now lost, Mix has found immortality as the rhyming Bingo call for ‘6’. 

The naked lady of Henly’s Corner, a striking sword-wielding statue

A statue  just off the North Circular near Golders Green, is officially entitled La Délivrance and commemorates the Battle of the Marne; more colloquially, it is known as Dirty Gertie.  The ‘nightclub dancer’ is the eponymous antiheroine of Dirty Gertie from Harlem USA, a 1946 ‘race film’ starring Francine Everett. ‘Dirty Gerty’ is the customary Bingo call for ‘30’. 

Claireece P. Jones is the full name of the obese title character in Precious (2009), the award-winning ghetto drama starring Gabourey Sidibe; Gladys Mills is the full name of roly-poly pianist Mrs Mills, who enjoyed her first hit with ‘Mrs Mills’ Medley’ in 1962. Which gives you  … two fat ladies, the Bingo call for ‘88’. 

Ben Kingsley is still best known for playing Gandhi in the 1982 biopic, which makes his first meal of the day Gandhi’s breakfast – the call for ‘80’ (i.e ‘ate nothing’: there’s also a rather far-fetched suggestion that the numerals ‘80’ give you a bird’s eye view of a little cross-legged man in front of an empty plate). 

The ‘giant clock’ referred to is the Abraj al-Bait Royal Clock Tower, currently under construction in the holy city of Mecca; this will stand 1,970 ft tall and have a clock face with a diameter five times that of Big Ben. The contractors are the Bin Laden construction company of Saudi Arabia: hence the inevitable nickname ‘Big Bin’. Mecca Bingo is, of course, the leading UK chain of Bingo halls with some 100 clubs nationwide (and an increasingly huge online operation). 

And finally, it was that unrivalled arbiter of taste Alan Partridge who once described Wings as “the band the Beatles should have been”: bingo wings!

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