Christmas quiz questions: Film, TV, music and more

Put your knowledge of all things culture to the test

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1. Who are the above, and how were they linked this year?

2. “When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?/ The loss we carry/ A sea we must wade/ We braved the belly of the beast/ We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what ‘just’ is isn’t always justice/ And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it/ Somehow we do it.”

Where were these lines read out in January, and by whom?

3. The novel The Dictator’s Muse by Nigel Farndale, published in June, featured which real-life filmmaker?

4. A Carnival of Snackery, published in October, is the second volume of diaries by whom? The author has a dustbin lorry in Sussex named after him.

5. “I’ll be taking flowers to the cemetery of my heart / For all of my lovers in the present and in the dark.”

The opening lines to what?

6. Where did Hershel Fink become Henry Finn?

7. Which television series broadcast in November carried a smoking warning at the beginning?

8. Les Inséparables, published in France in 2020 but in English translation only this year, is a long-suppressed novel by which writer?

9. The book Sticky McStickstick described which writer’s recovery from Covid-19? The title refers to the walking stick that helped him to walk again.

10. Which fictional character finally found a boyfriend after 31 years on screen, having come out to his boss in 2016?

Tap here for answers

1. They all won acting Oscars. Frances McDormand was named Best Actress for Nomadland; Youn Yuh-jung was Best Supporting Actress for Minari; Anthony Hopkins won Best Actor for The Father; Daniel Kaluuya was Best Supporting Actor for Judas and the Black Messiah.
2. At Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration: they were the first lines of “The Hill We Climb”, written and read by the poet Amanda Gorman.
3. Leni Riefenstahl, partly based on the life of the film director who made Triumph of the Will and Olympia.
4. David Sedaris; he was accorded the dustbin-lorry honour in recognition of his habit of going round his Sussex neighbourhood picking up roadside litter.
5. “Strangers by Nature”, the opening track on Adele’s new album 30.
6. At the Royal Court Theatre in London. The theatre apologised for naming an avaricious billionaire Hershel Fink, a Jewish stereotype (the character is not otherwise identified as Jewish), in Al Smith’s play Rare Earth Mettle.
7. The Beatles: Get Back, Peter Jackson’s documentary series that re-edited the footage from the band’s film Let it Be.
8. Simone de Beauvoir; it describes her passion for a classmate at school but had long been considered too intimate to be published.
9. Michael Rosen.
10. Waylon Smithers in The Simpsons, who had confessed his love for Mr Burns in 2016: in “Portrait of a Lackey on Fire”, an episode yet to be screened in the UK, he gets together with the series’ newest character, fashionista Michael De Graaf.

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