Today’s clues are to places. It would be true to say that these are places within the British Isles but would give the game away if they were more closely defined. There are eight places and the ninth question asks what they all have in common. Clues will include obvious giveaways for residents as well as surprises for everyone.

Should you find the answers easy to identify just consider that there is intellectual triumph in working out the form of all the clues – are you sure you have them all?

1. This place may playfully be identified through the TV characters Lovejoy and Raffles but is better known through its football team, who used to play at the Meadows next to its grammar school and its classical music star who died tragically young whilst internationally famous.  Some would describe its high point as making holes on the iconic music album.

2. Its colour may be deep purple – a musical lion, but its fame is in Jazz and its geography, with both the Romans and Normans offering a helping hand to modern interest – even if help was their last intent. Home to Christ College this place may be harder to guess than you imagine, not being a university town.

3. How one of its stars, on the move in a literacy campaign in the 1970s, met a rabbit a decade later, is another story and this place is firmly based on brewing and sugar. It may not be the new Seattle but where else can you watch a production of Romeo & Juliet (in a real theatre) and take a National Trust tour in that theatre?

4. Money was made here and there is an intergalactic link with a classic car – and is this the only place where public transport can be folded up and taken on a bus. Militarily, north of its centre was a right carry on five years before that blue box. A much earlier sport than Rugby has its name first recorded at the grammar school but knowing that names neither school nor town, though its sand and water may do that.

5. Quite separated from all the others by both water and law, here is a small harbour, castle and visiting seal, just down the road from the ceremonial parliament.

6. Starring in an unfinished mystery and at least two of that author’s earlier novels, this is the home of the math, and of the (councillor) diarist of Qercus magazine.

7. Here is home to a misnamed hall designed by Norman Foster and costing £65m. For certain Shakespeare knew all round the borough.

8. Whilst the place may be totally unknown to many, its apple named after a butcher, has international culinary fame.

9. And finally, what is it about all the above places, that makes them distinctive – and the only eight with that distinction?