Round 1: The Five Things

1 What weighs as much as 21bn suns, is 10 times the size of our solar system, breaks down the physical laws of space and time, and can swallow itself and everything around it?

a) Eamonn Holmes’s stomach
b) The newly discovered largest ever black hole, in the NGC 4889 galaxy
c) Louise Mensch’s nose
d) Greece’s sovereign debt
e) ITV’s Daybreak

2 The third series of BBC1’s The Impressions Show, starring Jon Culshaw and Debra Stephenson, began broadcasting in October this year, but this time around the show was forbidden from making jokes about which significant natural phenomenon?

a) Eamonn Holmes’s stomach
b) The newly discovered largest ever black hole, in the NGC 4889 galaxy
c) Louise Mensch’s nose
d) Greece’s sovereign debt
e) ITV’s Daybreak

3 What tried to stem the departure of hundreds of thousands of loyal followers by setting the costly toby-jug-faced man Adrian Chiles free this month?

a) Eamonn Holmes’s stomach
b) The newly discovered largest ever black hole, in the NGC 4889 galaxy
c) Louise Mensch’s nose
d) Greece’s sovereign debt
e) ITV’s Daybreak

4 What has, highly probably, had some of the drugs Nigel Kennedy was contemplating near it, been nuzzled by Metallica’s manager, and sniffed out corruption at the News of the World?

a) Eamonn Holmes’s stomach
b) The newly discovered largest ever black hole, in the NGC 4889 galaxy
c) Louise Mensch’s nose
d) Greece’s sovereign debt
e) ITV’s Daybreak

5 What was downgraded to category CCC, the world’s lowest, following an EU/IMF audit in June this year?

a) Eamonn Holmes’s stomach
b) The newly discovered largest ever black hole, in the NGC 4889 galaxy
c) Louise Mensch’s nose
d) Greece’s sovereign debt
e) ITV’s Daybreak

Round 2: Comedians and comedy

1 Which football-loving comedian told the Archbishop of Canterbury he thought atheists were as big a threat to humanity as climate-change deniers? Frank Skinner

2 Who wrote on their website that Jeremy Clarkson’s Top Gear was “one of the funniest shows on TV … one of the very few programs at the Burka Broadcasting Corporation still worth seeing”? Norwegian neo-Nazi mass murderer Anders Breivik

3 Which wealthy Hollywood-based comedian spent much of the year bravely trying to reclaim the word “mong” from its apparent misuse? Ricky Gervais

4 Which beloved male American comedian was mistakenly referred to as “she” on live TV in a piece on his untimely death by the abysmal expat journo Piers Morgan? Patrice O’Neal

5 Which insolent comedian spent most of September vomiting and retching, having guzzled a cocktail of E coli, salmonella and hepatitis, while arrogantly defying nature by attempting to swim the length of the Thames out of sheer vanity? David Walliams

Round 3: The Tories

1 Which of the following has never been a nickname for chancellor George Osborne?

a) Cabin Boy George
b) Oik
c) Pencils

2 All the following politicians were members of the exclusive, room-trashing, window-smashing, student dining society the Bullingdon club. But who dismissed these escapades, while applauding zero tolerance for summer rioters, by saying: “We all do stupid things when we’re young”?

a) David Cameron
b) George Osborne
c) Boris Johnson

3 Which of the following current or former Conservative MPs has not been the victim of opportunistic late-night burglars?

a) Oliver Letwin
b) Louise Mensch
c) Liam Fox

4 Which confusing Tory MP reveals their surprising sensitivity to black American jazz and the personal struggles of its economically and socially disenfranchised proponents in a series of thoughtful documentaries on BBC Radio 4?

a) Ann Widdecombe
b) Oliver Letwin
c) Ken Clarke

5 Which Tory MP looks the most like a cross between a blinky lemur and an ambitious eel?

a) Michael Gove
b) Louise Mensch
c) George Osborne

Round 4: Rock – true or false

1 The British Museum currently displays a glazed pot depicting Mark E Smith, of Manchester rock survivors the Fall. True

2 Soon after the breakup of REM, Michael Stipe appeared on a US TV chatshow competing in a quiz alongside Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy. True

3 The actor-comedian Russell Brand secretly blows into an ocarina belonging to the Amorphous Androgynous collective on Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds album. False

4 In his autobiography, Rob Brydon claims, amusingly, that he lost his virginity while listening to side two of the 1975 album Maximum Darkness by the Welsh progressive rock band Man, specifically during John Cipollina’s guitar solo on the band’s version of the folk-blues standard Codeine. False

5 Glenn Gregory, of Human League and Heaven 17, has invented a device that enables him to hack into supermarket PA systems and broadcast facetious announcements to confused shoppers. True

Round 5: Punk postmen

1 Which punk proto-goths backed postman Frank Bell on the 1979 single I’m a Cult Hero? The Cure

2 Name one of the three bands fronted by Birmingham punk legend and sometime postman Robert Lloyd. The Prefects, the Nightingales or the New Four Seasons

3 Which comedian played Manchester punk scenester John the Postman in the film 24 Hour Party People? Dave Gorman

4 Which punk postman recorded with Subway Sect? Vic Goddard

5 Which British blues guitarist, whose drunken 1976 on-stage anti-immigration rant inspired punk’s Rock Against Racism movement, once worked as a postman, delivering letters through a letterbox, rather than, as a drunk man, delivering race hatred through his mouth. Eric Clapton