Wednesday 13 July 2011

Quiz Trippers 3

If you don’t want to know what happened, then look away now. Yes, unlike yesterday’s posting, this one does contain spoilers. After the disappointment of yesterday, our intrepid bunch moved on to the bright lights of the big city, my Clark family ancestral homeland of Dundee, no less. It was nice to see the famous statue of Desperate Dan, the question about which has popped up in more than a few quizzes in its time. Still, on with the show.

Another day, and another challenge. This time it was a quiz which, if Biggins was to be believed, was against what were mostly teams of students from Dundee University. This one was sort of like a halfway house between Monday night’s themed quiz, and last night’s GK free for all. The rounds were themed, but at least the questions were fairly gentle, which certainly seemed to work for Harvey’s Angels, our team of Kevin, Alan, Aud, Lauren and Jen.

Once again Biggins was picking on Jen, mind you, he wasn’t the only one. Jen is a bit of a scattergun type of quizzer, going by the evidence of what we’ve seen. She chucks in answers in the general direction of the questions in the hope that one of them will hit the target sooner or later. It is actually a valid tactic, although it won her no brownie points with Kevin, who lost his rag a bit with her at a couple of points during the quiz. More the Grinch than Santa tonight. Still, at least they showed her getting an answer right tonight, even if it was accompanied by the ironic playing of the Hallelujah Chorus.

A round where the team had to pick which country had the point which was furthest north from three choices did for our guys, who surrendered outright lead, and in the end tied for first place . Last night’s tie break was a straight question. Tonight’s, and I kid you not, was settled by both teams making a paper airplane from one sheet of paper, and seeing who could throw it the furthest. I have never seen a quiz decided this way. It was funny enough while I was watching it, but if it had been me who'd been playing, and found that was the tie break, I'd have been pretty frustrated about it. Nevertheless, this was the challenge. A challenge which, funnily enough, was won by a team of engineering students. Maybe that was just a coincidence, but it did make me wondering whether the production team had any say in thye choice of tie break.

Look, the show is what it is. This is not a serious investigation into the sad lives of a group of obsessional quizzers. It’s a little bit of knockabout fun, and that’s the level on which I have been taking it.Enjoyable on its own merits.

3 comments:

DanielFullard said...

A point I made in my short review was that, although it may have seemed the airplane building was fixed a little and staged, it did used to happen at my Uni quizzes. In the union and local student bars the quiz tie breaker would always be something daft not related to knowledge at all!

Still I am enjoying this show very much!

joe said...

Unless the rules specifically forbade it, I think they could have won this tie break by screwing up the paper into a compact ball and hurling it across the pub.

It's still a pretty poor programme, whichever way you cut it. The players are just not very interesting. The environment is contrived. The quizzing part is kept very brief. And the commentary is just plain irritating.

Londinius said...

Hi Daniel - Hi joe,

Its certainly not for everyone, but then what is ? I'd like to see more of the quizzing as well. Mind you the quizzes themselves look as if they've been ordered to be in a very particular format - only 5 questions per round, for example. This is a series of short sprints, and certainly not the sort of thing which would showcase a team of great talent. Which the Angels are not, and I don't think that I'm being unfair in saying this, and I don't think is a statement that any of them could necessarily argue with.

Still enjoying it myself, though.

Dave