Too Much Information

Sometimes the clue really isn't in the question.

If you quiz regularly I'm surely you've experienced this sub-phenomenon before. You're asked a question - which seems at first to have an obvious answer - then the QM goes on to give you additional piece of information, which sends you off on a tangent, gets you to change your answer, and leads to you changing a right answer for a wrong one.

I mention this because it happened to me again last night. For reasons which I will be posting about later on in the year, I haven't been around to take part in a pub quiz for the best part of a fortnight, so it was a huge pleasure to get back to a proper quiz in the Duke of Wellington in Cowbridge last night. You'll remember I've mentioned this quiz before. A pound goes in for each player, and then another pound for the team that goes towards the jackpot. Sandwiches for everyone at half time. 7 questions for the jackpot at the end.

The last two times we've played we've lost the quiz on a tiebreak. Last night we won by two points - not a huge win, but certainly a comfortable one compared to the last few times we've played. I was particularly pleased with the guess the year question - in which year did Princess Margaret marry Anthony Armstrong Jones ? Against a little doubt from the team I plumped for 1960.

So, as I say, we won the quiz. Then the lucky 7. John and I independently dredged up that it was Dubrovnik that Byron once described as the Pearl of the Adriatic. From somewhere I recalled that it was the actor David Threlfall who starred in Shameless. The only question that gave us a problem was this : -
Which band have recently released their new album "No line on the Horizon".
Now the fact that we didn't know it straight away will tell you that we are far from pop music specialists. Still, working on the principal that you always go for the percentage answer when you haven't a clue - we were going to go for U2. Which would have resulted in us scooping the pot in its entirety, since nobody else was close to getting 7. However the QM went on to add that they've been in the news recently. This put us off the scent. You see the fact is that the Manic Street Preachers have recently released an album using material written by their long disappeared member Richie Edwards, and this has certainly made the news in Wales. So we changed U2 to the Manic Street Preachers.

Having said all of that I am quite sure that it wouldn't have gone down so well if we'd taken the jackpot as well as winning the quiz. But looking back on last night it does prove that where a quiz is concerned, sometimes there really is such a thing as too much information.