Creating the Proms Online Quiz

Radio 3 Interactive producer Philip Mattison brought the Proms Quiz to the website. Here, Philip lifts the lid on what was involved ...

In a spirit of 'they've got one so we want one too' (see Popmaster, Glastonbury Quiz, World Cup Quiz,) this year we've created the first ever BBC Proms Online Quiz!

The Quizmaster 'application' was originally created by an independent company called Kite to give audiences to Ken Bruce's Radio 2 show, Popmaster the chance to have a go themselves. Ken pops up in between questions and at the end gives helpful comments such as (when I was playing it anyway...) 'that must be your specialist subject' after a clip of Tammy Wynette singing 'Stand by your man'... hmmm.

The tone of the quiz needed looking at to make it appeal to audiences for the Proms (who pride themselves in really 'knowing their stuff'), but we were also keen for it not to lose the element of fun which was so appealing in the original ...

The design of the quiz went through various drafts before it became apparent that we should just stick with the colourful design already being used on the Proms Guide, website, and posters etc. Other pressing issues like the number of multi-choice options and the appropriate sound effects (harp, triangle, trombone glissando?) were also thrashed out. For quite a while the 'dummy' sound effect given for an incorrect answer remained a Glastonbury cow's moo (it was tempting to leave this in). And for the theme tune? What else but Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance.

Our voiceover artist became the inimitable Petroc Trelawny who read out probably the most boring script he'd ever been confronted with 'Well done, Correct, Good stuff, Try Harder etc etc) without a word of complaint and even contributed a few suggestions of his own, including a memorable Leslie Phillips-style 'Ding dong' (which was sadly dropped..).

Questions were being furiously compiled by Phil the question-writer (his specialist subject for Mastermind is now the History of the BBC Proms) and checked off, tweaked, rewritten and remarked over ('I didn't know that?!') by myself and Radio 3 Interactive Editor, Gabriel.

A few favourite questions (including about an unmentionably rude cantata by Mozart) were reluctantly let go along the way...

The last couple of years of Prom concerts were raided for audio and video examples through the attractively named BBC system AutoROT ('Recorded On Transmission', for the acronym-busters among you). The Proms team came up with a wonderful archive of photos for image- based questions. Other invaluable sources of information were Nicholas Kenyon's mighty tome The Proms - A New History and of course the Online Proms Archive.

Have a go - there are 1000 questions in the system from which 10 are randomly chosen for each 'play'. The 10 always consist of seven text questions, one image question, one based on audio and one based on video.

You can play on the Proms website or on Facebook (login required) And for those with a competitive streak, do add your score to the high scores table (you'll need to be signed in with BBC ID to do this on the Proms site; Facebook will recognise your Facebook details).

(And do send any feedback including suggestions for new questions to proms@bbc.co.uk)