麻豆约拍

Tom asked: If a former Secretary of State for International Development and the founder of the English Folk Dance Society joined forces with Howard Stern, why might the Mikado approve?

In the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, the Mikado advocates more public executions and the song 'I am so proud' includes the lines: 'Awaiting the sensation of a short sharp shock / From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block'. The phrase gained further popularity in the formulation of policy on law and order under the Thatcher governments of 1979-90. The three other elements lead to this phrase.

The Secretary of State听for International Development from 1997-2003 was Clare Short. English folk music owes much to the legacy of Cecil Sharp (1859-1924),听founder of the English Folk Dance Society. And finally Howard Stern听is, or was, a noted 'shock jock', famously fired from a succession of US radio stations. In 1997 he starred as himself in the film adaptation of his autobiography Private Parts.

Well done if you made the connections: see how you get on with Tom's new teaser question at the end of today's programme.

Q1听 (from Derek Thompson): Can you explain how a nation's symbol leads us by a paved path, past a row of French beans, to a town in Arizona where we can drink a pitcher of wine?

Q2听 (from Joseph Harris): How might Sus scrofa help you to transform veracious into excessive, rubbish into somewhere to put your charred remains, and DiMaggio into Simpson?

Q3听 Why might an alien visiting earth find themselves faced with a Bellowing biographer, the Sparta victim of a swan, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau?

Q4听 (Audio clips) Explain how you can arrive at one of these by combining the other two.

Q5听 If a 7th century Bishop of Autun appears annually in Doncaster and the Russian Crown Prince in Newmarket, where would you expect to find an occultation of the sun and the genus Quercus?

Q6听 What role have agricultural labourers played in the Life of Samuel Johnson, the Commons Public Accounts Committee, and Thomas Hardy's Boer war?

Q7听 (Audio clips)听 After listening to these voices and pieces of music, how much have you got?

Q8听 What might be on the menu if Carol Ann Duffy set a MasterChef challenge to create: an aubergine dish in Zambia, pasta in Comoros, a stodgy English staple in South Korea, and multi-coloured ice cream in Tuvalu?

Tom's puzzle this week is:

Fry's solicitor and the greatest of all Victorian engineers might give you a clue as to how Jay-Z came out of DC. Can you explain why?

Don't feel you have to e-mail or write to us with the answer, as there are no prizes: but Tom will reveal the answer next week.

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