"Win A Night Out With A Well-Known Paranoiac" Quiz

Answer: They covered up facial injuries he suffered in World War II.

Flight Lieutenant James Keith O'Neill Edwards had a distinguished career in the Royal Air Force before his Dakota C-47 transport aircraft was shot down over the Netherlands in 1944. He was one of a large number of WWII burn victims to receive pioneering plastic surgery for his injuries, a branch of medicine that was at that time very much in its infancy.

Edwards-esque facial hair certainly goes well with British pub landlords. A previous landlord of a favourite watering hole of mine, the Bag O'Nails in central Bristol, looked exactly like the sort of person Barry was imagining, although his friendly, tiny gas-lit pub couldn't be more different.

Answer: Nancy Mitford

The two "neckless men in blazers and cravats" advise Barry that the bar is exclusively for the use of "Nobel Prize winners, latter-day saints, people who've seen God and selected relatives of our dear Queen." Quite. Haven't we all been to pubs like that?

Nancy Mitford didn't invent the "U and non-U" idea - it was a little known linguistics professor, Alan Ross - but it was her tongue in cheek essay "The English Aristocracy" in the mid-1950s that brought it to public attention. Its main thrust was that the aspiring middle classes used fancy language in an attempt to appear upper class, whereas the REAL upper class used plain words because they didn't need to prove their status.

The six Mitford sisters were, to put it mildly, controversial figures and several of them (but not Nancy) publicly supported Fascism and Hitler in WWII. They would doubtless have approved of "crypto-Fascist Uncle Roger" who sets about Barry in the restaurant in the next verse of the song, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Answer: Cuba has never been a self-governing monarchy.

Cuba was ruled by a series of Spanish governors from colonisation until independence, and then had a presidential system until the revolution in 1959.
Barry really should have tried somewhere else - Hawaii perhaps?

After Barry has vainly tried to show them his credit cards, the two men finally announce "OK sonny - it's time that you were taught a lesson and there's only one thing that your sort understand!" and we've reached, in what's going to become a predictable fashion, the end of the first verse.

Answer: Spain, Portugal and Andorra

Yes, Spain shares the Iberian peninsula with Portugal and Andorra even though the name of its national airline, Iberia, might make you think otherwise.

There is also another Iberia over in the Caucasus; it's the name of an ancient kingdom occupying some of the territory of present day Georgia, which is why the "Iberia Restaurant" in north London serves Georgian cuisine and not paella or gazpacho. Barry, however, was probably at a place selling the latter.

Answer: Piedmont

Asti is produced in north-western Italy, in the south-west of the region of Piedmont, especially (unsurprisingly) in the area around the city of Asti itself.

Back in the 1970s/80s Asti Spumante was firmly looked down upon by wine connoisseurs as a "poor man's champagne" (at best), not drunk by anyone with the slightest hint of good taste. That's certainly the image that would have prevailed when "Win A Night Out" was released. As a devotee of real ale/craft beer and therefore a lost cause to the wine experts, I don't mind admitting that I rather used to like it.
Since the early 90s, the Italians have been trying hard to improve the quality and image of Asti, and those who know about such things say it's much better wine these days.

Answer: South Korea

The "Toilet Culture Theme Park" is in Suwon, a large city 20 miles south of Seoul. This is the place that takes its public hygiene extremely seriously; the city's tourism website has a walking tour of the city's public toilets with photos and most of them are magnificent structures. The theme park was built in homage to the late former mayor who started the campaign to improve the city's public health and is situated alongside a large purpose-built toilet museum that opened in 2011.

India is home to the Sulabh International Museum of Toilets in New Delhi, another serious museum devoted to the history of public hygiene and its website is well worth a visit.

Answer: Aquae Sulis

Aquae Sulis - "the springs of Sulis" - was named after the Celtic goddess Sulis that the local population worshipped at the springs in the Bath area at the time of the Roman conquest of Britain. The Romans thought she was the same as their own goddess Minerva and so turned the site into a shrine to both personas of the goddess.

Caldes de Montbui is another hot springs where you can visit the remains of Roman baths, but that one is near Barcelona.

Thermopylae is also the site of hot springs, but it's in Greece and is best known for the epic battle between the Greeks and the Persians there in 480BC.

The term "aquae vitae" - "waters of life" - is applied to various types of distilled spirits. Whisky, for example, gets its name from the Gaelic for "water of life" - "uisge beatha."

Are her parents really away in Bath and is Barry safe? It wouldn't really be in keeping with everything that's happened to him so far would it?

Answer: Inside the Great Seal of the United States on a wall

Just after WWII a group of rosy-cheeked Soviet schoolchildren visited the US Ambassador in Moscow and gave him a gift of a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States. He liked it so much that he hung it on the wall of his study in his residence, where it remained for several years in spite of numerous electronic "sweeps" as it was a passive bug that only came to life when stimulated by an electronic signal from outside.

The bug was finally discovered in 1952. The US didn't go public with it, until 1960 during the Gary Powers U2 spy plane crisis. It was used as evidence that the Russians had also been spying on the US, thereby undermining an anti-US UN resolution that the Soviet Union had tabled.

No such sophistication was required to catch poor Barry!

Answer: The Incredible Hulk

Two "Incredible Hulk" issues from the autumn of 1973, "The Hate of the Harpy" and "Calamity In The Clouds" covered the story in which villain MODOK kidnaps Betty Ross, uses gamma radiation to transform her into Harpy and turns her against the Hulk with initial but inevitably only temporary success. Betty has since continued to lead the usual life of a superhero's love interest, regularly being abducted, killed, resurrected and transformed into things. She does look rather fetching as Red She-Hulk, I've always thought.

The original Harpies were a race of half-woman half-bird creatures from Greek mythology, where they were usually - but not always - portrayed as baddies. Hearing the description of Barry's assailant, however, it wouldn't surprise me if Mr Andrews had been a Hulk fan in his formative years.

Answer: He has had his brain transplanted into the body of a sheep.

"I'm really in a hospital bed / There is a smell of formaldehyde in the air (...) And the nurse is saying "Be a good boy and drink it all up" / And I realise - that I can't feel my legs! / And the shape in the bed isn't my shape at all, and I want to cry out BUT I CAN ONLY BLEAT!"

Did you really expect anything else from the mind of a "well-known paranoiac?"
"Win A Night Out" pre-dated Lecter's debut in "Red Dragon," "Reservoir Dogs" and the grisly "Saw" films - the inspirations for the three wrong answers - which is why it's even possible to work out this question if you haven't heard the song before.