The Perils of AYAE

This really isn’t a complaint. Nobody forced me to go on AYAE – although Twelve Yard did make a point of asking me very nicely to apply for it – and the whole thing was a lot of fun, a good experience. Should there ever be an Are You An Egghead 3 and you are thinking of applying, my advice would be to definitely go for it. If you don’t get in then you haven’t lost anything, and if you do get in you’ll have a ball.

So what’s the problem then ? Well, it works like this. Last week was half term, which is ironic, since it was in the last half term holiday in the summer term that I recorded my appearances in AYAE. Being as it was half term I threw caution to the winds, and played in 4 quizzes. Desperate to play, I even ignored the fact that John was under the weather, and Phillippa wasn’t interested, and played in two of them on my own.

Yes, I know that you really shouldn’t play in a pub quiz on your own. If you haven’t read Marcus Berkmann’s “Brain Men” – in the latest edition retitled “A Matter of Facts “, then he goes into some detail about why you shouldn’t. Incidentally, unless your reading this blog by mistake, then you really would love this brilliant book. Suffice it to say that playing by yourself, you look like the worst kind of sad recluse, Billy-no-Mates, quiz obsessive imaginable. Worse than that, you might just win.

Quick cut to last Tuesday night. By this time I’d played on my own in a good quiz on Sunday, and won. Then I played in Newport on Monday night, in the middle of a great team, and we narrowly lost to a team that had a substantial handicap. Tuesday was another solo effort in the new look Duke of Wellington quiz in Cowbridge. This week we had 7 rounds of 10 questions, rather than 8. First and last were General Knowledge, and the other 5 were all concerned with Halloween in some shape or form. As I said last week, there’s a hell of a lot goes into making this quiz, and I salute the landlord who puts it all together himself. I won.

That’s not actually the point. I’m not writing this to big myself up – alright, that may be part of it – but to explain what happened next. First prize was 2 bottles of wine. I suggested that the landlord give one of them to the SOBs, the team who came second. He said that I could do it if I wanted to, so, bottle in hand, I approached the table, handed over the bottle with my congratulations, and was rewarded with a quizzical look from one of the team members.
“Where do I know you from ? “ he asked. I considered reminding him that I had played in the previous week’s quiz, but he then remembered,
“Was that you playing in Are You An Egghead last night ? “ he asked. So I confessed, guilty as charged, and then the whole Mastermind thing came out as well. We were all on our way out of the pub at the time, so its difficult to know whether my TV exploits, such as they are, will become common knowledge throughout the pub, and whether it will make any difference in the end. I hope not, but I have my doubts.