Straight from the HOBBY horse’s mouth

PAMELA BROWN, the producer of Granada’s Junior Criss Cross Quiz, is becoming quite an authority on hobbies and ambitions.

She has to be — to keep up with the young participants in her popular Thursday quiz programme.

“Lots of people go around labouring under the delusion that all children are interested in these days are pop music and the Twist and that all the boys want to be engine drivers and all the girls nurses,” said Miss Brown. “If only they knew!”

“Contestants in Junior Criss Cross Quiz represent a pretty fair cross section of intelligent juvenile humanity, and the range and variety of their ambitions and interests are astonishing, to say the least.”

Fourteen-year-old contestant Stephanie Knight, from Urmston, near Manchester, for instance, ‘collects’ old buildings!

“Whenever I go on holiday somewhere and there is an old castle or a cathedral in the vicinity I make a point of visiting it,” Stephanie explained.

“I try to remember what I’ve read about the period, and imagine what life must have been like in those days.”

Not that Stephanie is an indoors girl. Her ambition at the moment is to play for England at netball or lacrosse.

Angela Owen, 13, of Hazel Grove, Cheshire, wanted to become a professional photographer.

Michael Critchley, aged 14, of Swinton, Lancashire, told Miss Brown, he intends to become an architect when he grows up. And in the meantime his spare time is spent designing and planning buildings “for his own amusement.”

He carries out most of his plans too — but in model form.

Thirteen-year-old Adrian Smith, of Peel Green, Eccles, near Manchester, wants to become a surgeon.

But 14-year-old Roger Collier, of Higher Crumpsail, near Manchester, just wants to be a millionaire!

Barry Edwards, also 14, of Byrom Street, Manchester, was more restrained. His hobby is gardening and he transformed the site of a torn-down house next door into a plot of flowers.

When the site was turned into a car park, he moved his plants into the back yard in boxes — and was rewarded for his pains with a collection of rare and valuable seeds from a London gardener who had heard his story in Junior Criss Cross Quiz.

“This sort of thing happens a lot,” Pam Brown told me. “One girl who collected picture postcards got a whole collection sent her from another part of the country.

“A boy who collected matchbox labels received a batch of them a woman had picked up in the United States.”