Doing the New Year Quiz

Right, so this is what happened. I had a phonecall almost a fortnight ago from Howard, a regular at the Thursday night quiz. Since Brian, the finest quizmaster we ever had at the quiz, passed away, I have been question master for the annual New Year quiz. This was due to go off on the 6^th January. However, Howard told me, there were so many members of staff at the club suffering from Covid 19 at that time that the club couldn’t open, and so it was put back to Thursday 13^th.

In all the 26 years that I’ve been going to the quiz at the rugby club, the New Year quiz has been a bit of an institution. By tradition the first quiz of the New Year is always about the events of the previous year. Probably its most notable feature is the 4 part gamble. In the quiz at the club, the rounds are each 10 questions long. However, in the New Year quiz, the 10^th question always consists of  parts. Here’s the gimmick. You can answer 1, 2 or 3 parts, and you will get whatever you score for correct answers. If you attempt all 4 parts, though, if you get any part of the question wrong, then you don’t get any points at all for it. If you get all 4 parts right, though, you get double points – 8 points or the question. This is what makes the quiz possibly more exciting than the majority of quizzes in the year.

If you go back 20 years, several of my teammates, including me, would have told you that of all the quizzes of the year, the New Year quiz was the one we most wanted to win. During the Christmas holidays we’d be scouring the papers to find out who married whom, what famous people named their kids born that year, and which famous people had passed away, since Brian had sometimes included these hatches, matches and dispatches in the gamble questions. I wouldn’t necessarily say that it ruined the year if we lost the New Year quiz, but it certainly made a good start to the year when we won.

I started to go off the New Year quiz in the late noughties when the smart phones started coming into their own. If you choose to use a smart phone, then it really takes the gamble out of a 4 part gamble. One of the older teams would draft in younger, extra members for the New Year quiz, who used their phones, and so one of the other teams began using theirs as well. Prior to this time if you got one gamble right you were doing well, and if you got two right in an evening you were going to win the quiz. We had the ridiculous situation where both these teams were gambling 4 or 5 times, and beating all other teams by over 30 points. Yes, of course I used to moan like hell about cheating and what this was doing to the quiz. I’m far too childish to just let it go.

Sadly Brian passed away in 2016, and so I’ve been question master since the new year quiz of 2017. We didn’t have a quiz in 2021 dues to lockdown. I’m delighted to say that the phone cheating has stopped – and I can’t recall it going on in any of my New Year quizzes.

So to the 2022 New Year quiz about events of 2021. Now, if you’ve ever put your own quiz together, you’ll have an idea of whether putting a quiz together is something that you enjoy, or not. I like to think of myself that I’m pretty creative, and I do get pleasure from taking the raw material of facts, and crafting them into questions, and rounds of questions. When I first started I would write each question out maybe as many as three times in the process. Well, I don’t do that now but I enjoyed putting the quiz together over Christmas. As for how it worked, well, the thing about this particular quiz, more than any other quiz during the year, if you put in some work to prepare it is more likely to yield you some points. And I know that my team of my youngest daughter, son-in-law and two of our friends did at least watch some of the end of year review shows which tend to abound at the end of December. To cut a long story short, they won the first round. They won the second round. In fact they won most of the rounds, ad those rounds they didn’t win, they only lost a point of their lead. They also had the highest score on the handout. When I was last question master they adopted the name The Scarecrows because, in the words of my son-in-law “We haven’t got our brain with us tonight.” After assuring all the other teams that I hadn’t fed them any answers prior to the quiz, I also told them that they’ll have to stop using the name Scarecrows after that performance, next time that I’m question master.

That’s a point as well. After the quiz, Dai Norwich – so called because his name is David, Dai for short, and he comes from Norwich – after the quiz Dai asked if he can include me on the rota as a semi regular setter now. I didn’t say no. However, I didn’t say yes, either. I’m just not yet sure that I’m that ready to commit again. At least, on the bright side, I did enjoy being question master on Thursday a lot more than I enjoyed doing it a couple of months ago. So I guess that’s a watch this space.