In Search of the Golden Brain

I’ve never been very good at being a comedy geek. I think I’m supposed to have lain under my bedcovers at night, listening to obscure radio comedy. I never did that. I was also supposed to be addicted to double bills of Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show on BBC2 in the 90s. I never did that, either.

But if there’s one cliche I did manage to follow, it was my love for that rare thing these days: the TV comedy tie-in book. Even in the 80s and 90s, it was more difficult to rewatch the comedy you loved than it is now; at the very least, it was far more expensive. Books were your way to stay in touch with your favourite show. And among a certain demographic at least, something like Bachelor Boys seems quoted almost as much as The Young Ones itself these days.¹

Less talked about perhaps, was the series of Spitting Image books released in the second half of the 80s. (Ownership of which got me a conversation with a girl in secondary school, which is more than most books did for me at the time.) And out of all of them, the very first from 1985, The Appallingly Disrespectful Spitting Image Book, is the one I have the fondest memories of. After all, how can you resist a book which includes this?

That Quincy joke is perfect.

Still, among all the hilarity, one aspect of the book intrigued me. Because along with all the parodies of everything under the sun, there was one part where I just couldn’t figure out whether it was a joke… or whether it was real.

Decades later, we can finally decipher it. But we need to take a little detour first.

*   *   *

What is there left to say about the ill-fated Masquerade, the treasure hunt which ended in scandal and infamy?

I’ll give you the short version, for those who haven’t heard of it. In 1979, artist Kit Williams wrote and illustrated a rather unusual book. This book – indeed called Masquerade – contained hints about the location of a valuable 18-carat golden hare, buried for real in Bedfordshire. After a three year hunt, the hare was finally discovered, and… well, I don’t want to ruin the story for those who don’t know it. For more, I highly suggest reading “Kit Williams’s Golden Hare” (Part One, Part Two), by Jimmy Maher. The important thing for us is to acknowledge that Masquerade was a real cultural phenomenon.

And of course, such a cultural phenomenon was going to be chewed up and spat out by comedy writers. Of all shows, Sorry! did a pretty good take on it in “The Rabbit and the Pussycat” (TX: 28/10/82), where Timothy went on a hunt for a “golden rabbit”. After the usual blurting of clue solutions in the pub and the like, Timothy ends the episode having gained a new girlfriend; the true treasure of the whole experience. What sounds trite and obvious is actually beautifully done, mainly because the programme doesn’t explicitly link the two things. We’re left to make the connection for ourselves.

But the most intriguing parody came from, yes, a certain comedy tie-in. At the front of The Appallingly Disrespectful Spitting Image Book, we are greeted with the following:

And sure enough, flick forward a few pages, and behold the sight of the unpleasant Golden Brain:

This page is followed by the actual puzzle itself, a direct pastiche of Masquerade:

And just one question flicked across my mind, when I first read all the above in the 90s: is this real? Had they actually buried a golden brain, or is all just a big joke? After all, the very nature of the Spitting Image book was that it was full of silly parodies. Sat next to a stupid advert for products like “The Sinclair We-haven’t-thought-of-it-yet”, or trying to get you to bank with “Natlays Midloyd”, the idea that this might be a real competition just didn’t seem particularly likely.

This feel of just being an extensive joke is reinforced by the following disclaimer at the beginning of the book:

“N.B. The Golden Brain Competition is open to members of the Spitting Image team, their relatives, brain modellers, map-readers and hole-diggers. Offer closes Christmas 1986.”

Surely, if there was a real golden brain to be dug up, then the small print would be real small print? You can’t joke around with the legal language if there’s a prize worth thousands of pounds, can you? There has to be a limit to the kind of stunt Spitting Image could pull.

Moreover, even if the puzzle was actually solvable, surely the solution would simply be some stupid message. Perhaps along the lines of THE GOLDEN BRAIN DOES NOT EXIST, DO YOU THINK WE’RE MADE OF MONEY?, or something.

Over the years, I wondered. But somehow, I never quite got round to digging at this particular mystery, either metaphorically or literally. It remained something I’d occasionally ponder… and then forget. I am very good at not doing things. It’s my speciality.

But occasionally, I manage to get round to them.

*   *   *

Let’s not mess around any longer. Yes, the puzzle was real, and yes, it had a solution. But more to the point: yes, an actual golden brain was buried somewhere, and solving the puzzle lead directly to its location.

Not that I am in any way capable of solving this puzzle by myself. I am, however, capable of using Google. And one of the very few concrete references to this puzzle over the years is on the website of an organisation called The Armchair Treasure Hunt Club.

Set up in 1992, The Armchair Treasure Hunt Club does exactly what it says on the tin. Through a quarterly newsletter and various events, they not only report on news of treasure hunts set by others, but they also set their own treasure hunts for members, which continues to the present day.² But what interested me when I first came across their website was the November 1992 issue of their club newsletter, which promises: “Spitting Image – The Golden Brain solution”. Bingo. Sadly, the club newsletters are only available to members, so the printed solution isn’t in the public domain.

That is, until now. Current newsletter editor Pete Colbert of the club was extremely generous with his time, and has shared with me everything published in the club’s newsletter about The Golden Brain. And while there is a mention of the competition in the aforementioned issue, the full solution was published a couple of issues later, in March 1993.

That solution was written by Gordon Rootkin, under the title “Quest for a Golden Walnut (Or how I ended up with half a brain)”. Because yes, the solution was written by one of the winners of the competition. Which means that not only can we find out the solution to the puzzle, but we also know what happened to the prize itself.

But first things first. In an extremely well-written piece, Gordon helpfully gives us some additional background to the competition:

“Faber & Faber published the Spitting Image book in the autumn of 1985, aimed at the lucrative Christmas market. Although authorship was credited to John Lloyd, it was in fact the work of many contributors. One was Jon Blair, then the executive producer of the Spitting Image TV series, who created a Masquerade spoof with a buried treasure. At that time Spitting Image had an ongoing satire called ‘The President’s Brain Is Missing’ (the president being Ronald Reagan, though it’s probably no less apt today) and he asked Peter Fluck and Roger Law. the designers of Spitting Image’s latex puppets, to produce a golden walnut or ‘brain’ as the treasure hunt prize.

The trouble was, readers were amused by the spoof but no-one believed it was a real treasure hunt with real buried treasure.

In the spring of 1986, Spitting Image‘s public relations company were briefed to revive the book’s sales and they put out a press release explaining that the treasure hunt was genuine. I read an article about it on Easter Sunday and rushed to the bookshop the moment it opened after the holiday.

It was immediately apparent that The Golden Brain wasn’t going to be difficult to solve and that others would also be on the track, so with my rudimentary knowledge of cryptanalysis I set to work.”

Which immediately makes me feel much better about my confusion as to whether the puzzle was real or not. It wasn’t just me that was confused – everyone at the time was confused as well. To the point that nobody had bothered to get anywhere with the competition, and the publisher had to put out a press release to clarify it!

OK, enough of the background. You want the solution, right?

*   *   *

I am now going to thoroughly spoil the solution to The Golden Brain. If you want to have a go at it yourself, you should stop reading this article now. The below is obviously based on the work by Gordon Rootkin, but I’ve rewritten it in my own words to give you a fighting chance at understanding how to solve the puzzle without a lot of background knowledge. If I were you, I’d have the puzzle loaded in another tab ready to easily flick back to – or, better yet, grab your copy of the actual book if you have one.

First of all, take a look at the words around the border of the picture; the most obvious reference to Masquerade in the whole puzzle. While it may at first be telling you THIS WHOLE THINGS CRAP IT MEANS BUGGER ALL MATE ITS USELESS³, if you just take the red letters and go clockwise from the bottom right, it spells out USE THE PANGRAM. A pangram is a sentence which uses every single letter of the alphabet once, as per the famous “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”.

We then have to look at the collection of objects at the bottom of the picture. These are, in order:

• A fox with hammer & sickle symbol
• A photograph of Romeo (with Juliet)
• An Oscar statue
• A glass of whisky
• A statue of a Zulu warrior
• A model of an American civil war soldier
• A can of Tango drink
• A Monopoly hotel
• An eraser
• 11 dates
• A golf ball
• A model of a Ford Sierra
• Two badges with “Pennsylvania” written on them
• A lemur
• A soldier’s uniform
• A BBC microphone
• A set of dice with letters on the faces spelling “BRAVO”
• A photograph of Victor Mature
• An LP sleeve by Echo and the Bunnymen
• An X-ray photograph
• A triangle
• A ‘jack’ as used in the children's game
• A stuffed wolf’s head with the date 1759

To varying degrees of obviousness, the above objects refer to the NATO phonetic alphabet – Foxtrot, Romeo, Oscar, etc.⁴ In order then, we have:

FOXTROT ROMEO OSCAR WHISKY ZULU
YANKEE TANGO HOTEL INDIA NOVEMBER
GOLF SIERRA PAPA LIMA UNIFORM
MIKE BRAVO VICTOR ECHO X-RAY
DELTA (JACK) QUEBEC

Yes, you’ve spotted the tricky bit of the above; if we’re searching for a pangram, why are there only 23 objects, rather than 26? Answer: because the “jack” near the end is meant to stand for four of the letters, not just the J. Of such evil considerations are puzzles like this made.

So, the pangram we’re searching for is as follows, split up into words⁵:

FROWZY THINGS PLUMB VEXD JACK Q

Not much help, is it? To turn this into something useful, let’s leave it for a moment, and take a look at the odd “punched tape” red border around the main image, and the dominos at the bottom. These are actually words, written in braille. Unless you already know the system, translating this is a faintly arduous task. I want a sodding Golden Brain, please.

Reading left, top, right, bottom, we get the following:

EZZGXHZRSFOGRUUGAIXHXHZMFLTUSILE
LUSUUGDMXHZPZPUVIFSAIXHXHZMUILXSZEEGLUR
KUDFVZPISZEFAFKYILWXHZMSFOZFTFIL
KZEXHZTVFJZIELZFVOULZHZVZEFPDZSIAFLXKUD

And here’s where we have to apply a bit of amateur cryptanalysis. We’re supposed to use our pangram as an alphabetic cipher, where we replace each letter with another, as follows:

FROWZY THINGS PLUMB VEXD JACK Q
ABCDEF GHIJKL MNOPQ RSTU VWXY Z

This then translates our braille message to the following:

SEEKTHEBLACKBOOKWITHTHEPANGOLINS
NOLOOKUPTHEMEMORIALWITHTHEPOINTLESSKNOB
YOUAREMILESAWAYFINDTHEPLACEAGAIN
YESTHEGRAVEISNEARCONEHERESAMUELIWANTYOU

Or, with punctuation and spacing added for clarity:

"SEEK THE BLACK BOOK WITH THE PANGOLIN'S NO. LOOK UP THE MEMORIAL WITH THE POINTLESS KNOB. YOU ARE MILES AWAY. FIND THE PLACE AGAIN. YES, THE GRAVE IS NEAR. COME HERE SAMUEL, I WANT YOU."⁶

The number on the pangolin in the drawing is 0 330 281216, and here is where we thrillingly touch on another small part of comedy history. This is the ISBN number for the first edition of The Meaning of Liff, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s paean to observational comedy, published in 1983. The link to Spitting Image in the form of John Lloyd surely doesn’t need dwelling over.

The definition we are searching for in the book is the following:

Plympton (n.)
The (pointless) knob on top of a war memorial.

So, the Golden Brain is buried in Plympton, correct? Alas, no. The puzzle is going to make you work harder than that, although no doubt plenty of people got stuck at this point. We can only hope that people didn’t start either climbing war memorials, or digging them up.

Nonetheless, we have just made a significant step forward. Now that we have Plympton, we then have to look elsewhere in the Spitting Image book for our next clue. And here is where we have yet another piece of misdirection. The below is just meaningless nonsense satirising pretentious poetry, right?

Wrong. Our clue is in the explanatory text by “Kingsley Amis”, which reveals that the attached poem was written by someone from Plympton. This poem, far from just being a piece of whimsy, is actually our main clue to the location of the Golden Brain:

this mild winter positively must attract daylightsaving
timebeguiling interlopers by tselliott

ingenious ptolemaic charts
indivisible piteous hearts
egotistical immoralinvisible foolishness
propitious cities
tattered cryptochristian tinkercarts

And to find out what to do with this, we have to go right back to the main puzzle illustration. Take a look at the drawing of Reagan. His “eyes” have dots in them, and his open head is being watered by a “tea”pot containing a cross. Meanwhile, the braille we decrypted earlier contains the phrase “Come here Samuel, I want you”. From these two clues, we are supposed to divine that the above ridiculous poem needs to be translated into Morse code, with all the i letters representing the dots, and the t letters representing the dashes.

Doing this gives us the following Morse code:

-. / . / .- / .-. / - / --- / .-.
-... / .- / -.--
.. / -. / -
.... / .- / -
-.-. / .... / .
.-. / .-.
--- / -.-. / -.-

Which translated again, results in one of the final clues to the Golden Brain’s location:

NEAR TORBAY IN THATCHER ROCK

Thatcher Rock?

*   *   *

Thatcher Rock:

It’s an island, just off the coast of Torbay, ideal for buried treasure. I mean, seriously, ideal. It looks like Kirrin Island from The Famous Five. It’s a children’s idea of where you might bury something valuable, in the best possible way. You can just imagine the winner’s trip to the island, desperately scrabbling for the hidden treasure, striking gold, and waving their shriveled walnut in the air. The obvious Margaret Thatcher reference just completes it as a perfect location.

Alas, it was not to be. The treasure was never actually dug up by somebody carefully following the clues. But luckily, we do know exactly what happened to it. Let’s go back to our account by Gordon Rootkin, who wasn’t just the person who supplied the full solution to the puzzle, but was actually the winner of the Golden Brain. Or, should I say, one of the winners. Because here’s the inevitable twist.

Gordon had managed to get as far as deciphering the reference to Thatcher Rock. But unfortunately, he then drew a blank:

“This was as far as I got in the week following Easter. My problem came when I found out more about Thatcher Rock. A rocky outcrop, accessible only by boat from Torquay, it was simply too big to search inch-by-inch for a golden walnut. There had to be another clue to mark the spot precisely.

There was, but I never did work it out. Sending my solution to Faber & Faber (who ignored it) and to John Lloyd, I was contacted by an excited and relieved Jon Blair who said that another hunter had got as far as me, so he would declare a dead heat and award each of us one-half of the Golden Brain. The other winner turned out to be two ladies – Sandra Presland and Anne Byson who worked in the computer facility at Liverpool University.

As it happened, the Golden Brain comprised a 22 carat walnut kernel in two halves, with a 22 carat casing again in two halves. This meant we could be awarded half a brain each. The whole Brain was reunited for a few memorable seconds one evening in a Hertfordshire pub, when I met Sandra and Anne to swap stories, and then split forever.”

And who would have thought we would get our answer so comprehensively and viscerally? The sheer joy in reading the above from Gordon never quite goes away, no matter how many times I read it. I never thought, when starting down this road, that we would find out the true story of the Golden Brain in this much detail.

But, you may be saying to yourself, there’s still a missing piece of the puzzle. Just how was the treasure actually supposed to be found on Thatcher Rock? As Gordon says, surely you couldn’t be expected to dig everywhere across the the entire bloody island? Is it still possible it was never actually buried at all?

Luckily, Gordon found the answer out to that, too:

“I did eventually discover the mystery of the ‘end game’ to the hunt. Parts of the Braille code were drawn in another colour and read ‘RADIO’ and ‘ACTIVE’. Apparently the Golden Brain had been buried along with an alarm clock that had luminous (and presumably radioactive) hands. Treasure hunters were supposed to row to Thatcher Rock armed with a Geiger Counter to win the Brain!”

This is true, but with a wrinkle not stated by Gordon. There are actually two different colours in the braille code: yellow, and blue. The yellow codes do indeed spell RADIO directly, but the blue ones spell XIJZFO; you need to put that through the cipher as per before in order to come up with ACTIVE.

So, the Golden Brain really was actually buried on Thatcher Rock, likely by Jon Blair himself. (After all, who else would he trust to do it?) We can also assume that the poor sod had to go back and dig it up again, once the dead heat between the two potential winners became apparent. It perhaps seems unfortunate that, having done the absurdly hard part, the relatively easy RADIO ACTIVE clue was missed. Oh well. I doubt the winners lost that much sleep over it.

*   *   *

Which just leaves us with one final mystery. Let’s circle back to The Appallingly Disrespectful Spitting Image Book, and re-read the introduction to the whole competition. Because remember, there were two ways to learn the location of the Golden Brain. We’ve just investigated one. Here is the other:

“Believe it or not, this hideous object is worth thousands of pounds. Faber & Faber, painfully aware that this book hasn’t a paisley’s chance in hell of selling on its literary merits, coughed up the necessary in an attempt to capture, as they put it, ‘the walnut-loving end of the market’. You think they are mad. And who can blame you.

And yet, not as mad as all that, gentle browser. For anyone who is half-witted enough to want to own the ghastly thing, is hardly likely to possess the intelligence to work out how to find it. However, you are invited to try. For it is as likely to be found by the bright 33-year-old who made the puzzle up in the first place, as it is by an Oxford don.

Of all the 200 or so famous people who have appeared on Spitting Image as a puppet, only one knows the precise location of the gruesome medallion’s tomb. If you’re too bone-idle to work out the puzzle quietly and sensibly in your room, a simpler if less reliable method of winning the prize is as follows:

Wearing your Spitting Image T-shirt, accost the famous person you think it might be and, using either an electric megaphone or a rolled-up cone of cardboard, confront them loudly and insistently with the magic password:

Abracadee Abracadoo
You are the Walnut
Koo koo ke doo.

If correctly challenged, the celebrity is sworn to reveal to you and you alone the whereabouts of the loathesome ornamento.

Dame Fortune be with you fair seeker. And remember – members of the Royal Family are addressed as Your Highness, except for the Queen who answers only to Your Majesty.”

The more you think about the above, the more amusing it becomes. Spitting Image is literally encouraging you to bellow out stupid little ditties at members of the Royal Family through a megaphone. Forget all the fuss about the Queen Mother puppet in the show at the time: this is one of the most subversive ideas Spitting Image ever produced.

But assuming it’s not actually a member of the Royal Family who is likely to respond: just who was the celebrity we were supposed to accost? We know it’s one of the 200-odd people who’d had a puppet made of them. But who is the most likely? And are there any clues in the puzzle illustration itself? Surely it wasn’t Michael Heseltine?

I have no idea. Your suggestions are welcome. But hey, maybe it’d spoil the fun if we knew everything about the Golden Brain. We can allow ourselves a little remaining mystery.

With many, many thanks to Pete Colbert of The Armchair Treasure Hunt Club, without who this article would literally not exist. Thanks also to TheCouchtripper for image scanning, Mike Pitt for image editing, Tom Jolliffe for the image of Thatcher Rock (licenced under Creative Commons), and Tanya Jones for checking that the piece is generally comprehensible.

UPDATE (28/8/22, @ 12:45PM) Well, as sometimes happens with these articles, some research has popped up which casts some doubt on some of my conclusions here. That’s what I get for investigating a difficult mystery: they’re mysterious and difficult.

So one thing I had failed to note in my research is that John Lloyd had already been asked about the Golden Brain. Phil Norman’s excellent book Closet Reading has a whole section on TV tie-in books, where the subject came up:

“Lloyd explains: ‘The puzzle was real and the code could be broken. We were going to bury “Reagan’s Brain” on Thatcher Rock, which is a small, uninhabited island near Torquay. Sadly, with the book at the printer’s, when we went down there to bury the thing, we found the island was private, and completely out of bounds. The finder was told to take along a Geiger counter to find it. (I seem to remember the idea was to put it in a container covered in radioactive luminous paint.) Eventually two girls, I think, did manage to crack the code and send us their answer, so we gave them the prize.'”

Which means that while the main thrust of this piece stands, there now surely has to be some question as to whether the Golden Brain was actually buried after all. Gordon Rootkin specifically claims the prize “had been buried”, and his write-up seems extremely accurate otherwise. On the other hand, it’s Lloyd who was closer to the business end of actually getting the damn thing to Thatcher Rock. On the third hand, Lloyd certainly doesn’t get the details of the prize winners completely correct – I think we can trust Gordon on that one.

It at the very least means there’s more of a question hanging over the actual burial of the prize than I initially thought, although the solution and winners are still clear. More to poke at here, I think.

I’ll get poking.

---

1. Who farted?, My nob’s bigger than Heathrow Airport, and That-cher. There you go, I think I’ve covered everything. ↩

2. See here for a list of current, open hunts members are working on. ↩

3. I mean, seriously, no wonder people thought it was just a bloody joke. ↩

4. The stuffed wolf’s head referring to Quebec – a reference to the Battle of Quebec in 1759 involving General James Wolfe – is particularly difficult, at least to my 2022 eyes. ↩

5. Well, more-or-less, anyway. Although “Frowzy” is actually a word: “scruffy and neglected in appearance”. ↩

6. Note that the original message actually translates as CONE, rather than COME. Unless I’m being completely stupid – which is admittedly a possibility – I believe the original puzzle to be in error here, and accidentally used N rather than M. Luckily, the translated message is easily intelligible even with this error. ↩

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