Beatles Beat Cliff to Christmas Number One Spot

GET this into your thick heads: Cliff Richard has not had the most Christmas number ones. That shining honour belongs to The Beatles.

But the Christmas Cliff Myth is so strong that fully 90 per cent of British people answer his name when asked the question at pub quiz time. Maybe it’s all that mistletoe and wine.

We now have some measure of the extent of our pub quiz stupidity, thanks to TV channel Dave and its internet arm joindave.co.uk, which has researched the most common pub quiz bloopers in the country. The Christmas number one howler came in at number one, but there are plenty of others that make us go “Doh!”

Some of them are sneaky, trick questions, like the runner-up, What is Paul McCartney’s Middle Name? It’s Paul, suckers, as he was christened James.

Others follow the Cliff template in resulting from widely believed myths, like the one about the Great Wall of China being the only human-made thing visible from space. As Google earth proves, everything ican be spotted from space given the right kit, but nothing but a vague blueness is within the capacity of the unaided human eye.

Here are those dastardly Pub Quiz bafflers in full:

1. Who holds the UK record for the most amount of Christmas number ones?
2. What is Paul McCartney’s middle name?
3. Name the world’s largest desert?
4. What car did Rodney and Delboy drive in Only Fools and Horses?
5. Which man-made landmark can be seen from space?
6. How many countries make up Great Britain?
7. Who scored for England in the 1966 World Cup final?
8. In Dallas, who shot JR Ewing?
9. The Canary Islands were named after which animal?
10. Who is the Deputy Leader of Labour Party?

Answers: 1. The Beatles, not Cliff; 2. Paul; 3. Antarctica, not the Sahara; 4. Reliant Regal, not Reliant Robin; 5. None, not the Great Wall of China; 6. Three, not four (Northern Ireland is park of the UK, but not GB); 7. Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters, not Bobby Charlton; 8. Kristin Shepherd, not Sue Ellen; 9. The Dog (Canary sounds a bit like Canine, innit) not the Canary; 10. Harriet Harman, not John Prescott.