You Might Like This

Then Again You Might Not

As I was on my way out this morning to a local car boot sale, our friendly neighbourhood auctioneer stopped me to ask if I'd been on the channel 4 Pub Quiz website. I replied that I knew nothing about this - but then I don't think I've watched anything on channel 4 or any of its offspring for a while, so there's no great surprise there. Apparently she'd seen the adverts for it with Tony Robinson, David Starkey, Kevin McCloud and others.

Well, in the altruistic spirit I would like to think that I am well known for I went off to check it out as soon as I returned home, not for my own amusement, but purely for the benefit of you, my readers. I googled Channel 4 pub quiz Tony Robinson, and it was the first link that came up - apparently its More4 as opposed to Channel 4 - same meat, different gravy.

I'll be honest , I didn't pay much attention to all of the guff, just wanting to get on with playing the quiz. There was something about winning prizes, but the problem was after I logged out from playing the quizzes, and went off elsewhere, I found that I couldn't log back in again. For the last half an hour the site has told me that its loading, and it gets 3 quarters there, but never any further. Oh well, if you do get to go on, you have to register first, which is no real hassle. Then you get the choice - play on your own, or play against someone. I started playing on my own. You hvae to choose between the Clever Room, or the Really Quite Clever Room. Be warned - The Really Quite Clever Room is tougher than the Clever Room. For one thing you only have to choose between multiple choice answers on the clever room, whereas you have to type in answers in the other room, and if you make the slightest tiniest typo, then you get it wrong. The questions are harder as well.

Your score is calculated from the number of correct answers, and then from the average length of time it takes you to answer a question. I've always thought of myself as a quick quizzer, but I couldn't get my average for answering 10 questions down to less than 4 seconds, despite playing it for the best part of an hour.

Then I made the mistake of opting to play someone else. I really like the idea of being able to play a quiz against someone else online. However accepting a challenge from another player caused the whole website to freeze up on me, and I haven't been able to get back on it since.

Its worth having a look at, and hopefully you'll have better luck getting back onto the site than I have so far this afternoon.

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Its back to the Pheasant tonight. It pains me to say it, but its been a few months since I had a win on a Sunday night. There's no other quiz we've found at the moment, so its the pheasant, or nothing. The basic problem is the music round. There are two teams who are music specialists, and when you have 30 songs to identify song AND artist, then you can see how they can build up an impregnable lead which you can't make back up in the rest of the quiz. Not only that, though, on a quiz where we do keep within challenging distance, there always seems to be something in it which means we don't win.

Case in point. Take last week. We had a brilliant music round, where the answers were just provided by my daughter Phillippa and myself. We scored 49 points out of 60 to be lying in second place. However the team in front scored 60. The photo handout and list handouts came round. After that we had cut the lead to 5 points. If we could take another 2 out of them on the second handout, then we could surely do it on the GK round.

Second hand out was a picture of the human skeleton, and a list of 30 bones to label. We came second on that, dropping 6 points. However the team in the lead, who had a MALE NURSE on their team had a full house, and went back to 11 points in the lead. We took 5 points out of the lead in the GK round, but it was never going to be enough. They beat us by 6. We beat everyone else by over 10.

Did the QM know that the winning team had a nurse on their team ? Yes. Did he also know that they were very likely to have a lead over everyone after the music ? Yes.
In a quiz of 140 potential points, 90 of them were allotted to music or bones, where the winning team had a built-in advantage.

Bitter ? Me ? Probably. I mean, you accept that there is going to be a time when one team or another is going to have a little bit of the rub of the green, but when it happens week after week, its galling. So, I can't help wondering what we're going to have tonight - I know that one of the members of a team who haven't won for a couple of weeks is a keen ornithologist, so what's the betting we get a handout asking us to identify 30 different common garden birds. A case of 'name that tit' , I suppose.