Keeping it in the Family Trivia Quiz

Answer:

'My Cousin Vinny' was a 1992 film starring Joe Pesci as a newly qualified lawyer from New York who is called on to defend two men wrongly charged with murder. The Undertones song 'My Perfect Cousin' was released in 1980 and reached the top ten on the UK Singles Chart. The lyrics about a family member constantly quoted as the example to follow were based on the real life experience of one of the band's members. John Mortimer wrote 'A Voyage Round my Father' as a play in the 1960s based on his life with his barrister father, in whose footsteps he followed. 'Father Ted' ran for three series on UK television from 1995 until 1998. The story of three mismatched Catholic priests on a remote island, with their housekeeper was very popular. The series ended when Dermot Morgan, who played the lead character, died tragically early from a heart attack.

Stepmothers are prevalent in fairy tales and pantomime and are rarely portrayed in a sympathetic light. Both 'Cinderella' and 'Snow White' suffer at the hands of theirs. 'Stepmom' starred Susan Sarandon as a divorced woman who finds out she is dying and shows how she comes to terms with her ex-husband's new partner (Julia Roberts) who she knows will become her children's stepmother. 'The Good Wife' was a television series in which Julia Margulies portrayed a woman who has to return to her career when her husband is jailed. 'The Wife of Bath' is one of the pilgrims in Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales'. She has been married five times and highlights the double moral standard which applies to men and women - remember this story was written in the late 1300s!

Oscar Wilde wrote the play called 'An Ideal Husband' in the 1890s, based on a plot of corruption and blackmail in politics. Reg Smythe created the long running comic strip about the layabout 'Andy Capp', husband of the long-suffering Flo. The first daughter in the quiz is from the film starring Sarah Miles and Robert Mitchum. Set in Ireland, the plot is about an adulterous affair between a married woman and an army officer. Miles plays the woman and Mitchum is her boring husband. 'Mrs Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter' was a number one hit in the USA for Herman's Hermits in 1965 (it wasn't released as a single in the UK, the band's home country).

'A Story About My Uncle' is an adventure video game from 2014. The player has to negotiate a world of floating rocks while searching for Uncle Fred. 'Uncle Silas' dates from Victorian times and is a novel classed as a 'gothic mystery'. Including a classic 'locked room' death, the heroine of the story only narrowly escapes with her life. Grandparents are represented by two rather sickly songs (in my opinion). Clive Dunn took 'Grandad' to number one for three weeks in 1970 while the children's choir from St Winifred's School had the Christmas number one in 1980 with 'There's No-one Quite Like Grandma'. Both songs are rather too sentimental for my taste, but clearly I was in the minority!

Sisters are represented by the group Sister Sledge, originally a group of four sisters who had several hits in the 1970s and into the 1980s. 'Sister Act', and the follow-up 'Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit' both starred Whoopi Goldberg as a singer. In the first film, released in 1992, she is placed in a witness protection programme in a nunnery while in the follow up, a year later, she is persuaded to help the nuns by becoming a teacher in a school. As for the brothers, Dire Straits provide the first set with their song and album called 'Brothers in Arms', released in 1985 when the band was at the height of its fame. It is a haunting song about the heartache of war. 'The Brothers Karamazov' dates from the nineteenth century and was originally published as a serial between 1879 and 1880. A long and philosophical novel includes the murder of their father by one of the three brothers.

Another video game gives us the title 'Rysei: Son of Rome', dating from 2013 and set in Ancient Rome. The game play features a centurion named Marius. 'Steptoe and Son' was a British sitcom which began life on our television screens in 1962. It starred Wilfred Brambell and Harry H Corbett as a pair of rag-and-bone (junk) men in London. The USA moved the setting to Los Angeles and renamed the show 'Sanford and Son' while retaining the basic premise.

An Aunt Sally is a fairground game where attendants pay to throw items at a wooden figure of a woman. The game is believed to date from the seventeenth century although the name is likely to be more recent. 'Travels with my Aunt' was published in 1969 and describes how a newly retired bank manager has his life disrupted by his Aunt Augusta. His adventures with Augusta change his life completely, leading him to criminality, which becomes a profitable and exciting lifestyle. Our final family member is the mother. 'My Mother the Car', which fortunately never made it across the Atlantic, is a television programme which starred Jerry Van Dyke, brother of the more famous Dick. It only lasted for one season in 1965/6. The mother who became a car communicated via the radio in the vehicle. The idea never caught on, although a later, and similar, idea in 'Knight Rider' had far more success. Mother Goose originated in France as the narrator of Charles Perrault's seventeenth century collection of fairy tales. When translated into English, she became 'Mother Goose' and the character has since become famous as a pantomime character.