What Becomes of Quiz Ambitions?

In the broadest sense I’ve been a quizzer for as long as I can remember. By broadest sense, I mean that for as long as I can remember I regularly watched TV quizzes and tried to answer the questions before anyone else in the room (including the people taking part on the telly). I would play in any quizzes I could at school – and becoming the inaugural Elthorne High School Mastermind Champion is not the least proud boast I have ever made.- In 1988 I played in my first pub quiz, and within a few weeks I played in my first ever quiz league. In 2004 I played in my first TV quiz.

I could go on. But the point is, that I have had a long quiz career that has mostly brought me enjoyment and satisfaction over the years. There’s not many quiz ambitions that I’ve had that I haven’t achieved. I haven’t won Brain of Britain (although I did get to the final) and I’d love to win it, but it’s unlikely to happen bearing in mind that I have never yet reapplied, I have no plans to reapply at the moment, and to be honest, I’m certainly no better a quizzer than I was last time, and in all probability a lot worse. I would also love to win the CIU (Club and Institute Union) annual quiz, but again, I haven’t played in it for years, my team having broken up, and to be honest the best that happened even when I was a decent quizzer was that we came second.

On a non-national level though, I always had an ambition to become something of a quiz mentor. A quiz what? Well, let me try to explain. Come back with me to 1988, when I played in my first quiz league. In 1988 a local firm, O’Callaghan and McCarthy, sponsored a quiz league in Port Talbot that lasted for a couple of years. Port Talbot had previously possessed a pretty competitive league in the 70s, and the Swansea Bay area had been something of a hotbed of quiz league action in the 70s and 80s.

I was invited to attend the quiz in Port Talbot’s Railway Club by a friend of my wife’s family, Neville. Nev, God rest his soul, wasn’t a great quizzer, but he was a great man, and he became a very good friend. Because I was friends with Nev, and frankly for a complete novice was pretty good in the club quiz, I was invited to play in the club’s team in the O’Callaghan and McCarthy League. This was when I met my own unofficial quiz mentor, Alan Coombs.

If you talk to almost anyone playing in that league set up in the 70s or 80s in Port Talbot, they all remember Alan. Just before I first met Alan my own performance answering questions off the TV, and in the club’s quiz, had led me to the false belief that I was pretty good. Meeting Alan showed me that I had a lot to learn. He was just so good. Looking back 35 years, I know that he didn’t know everything. But it seemed like he did. I used to walk into the opposition’s pub for an away match in that league, and you could honestly see the other team mentally giving up as soon as they saw that Alan was there. In later years, other members of that team who’d known Alan for much longer than I had, told me in all sincerity that by the time I first met Alan he was already on the slide, and not the quizzer he had been. Well, all I could think was that he must have been awesome in his pomp.

I say unofficial quiz mentor because this really wasn’t a sort of Karate Kid thing – wax on wax off and all that. We didn’t talk exclusively about quizzes. But playing in the same team as a quizzer like Alan, you just couldn’t help picking up very useful advice – well, if you had anything about you, that is. We played together for about 3 years in the first place, but then in the early 1990s, the league having folded and a couple of players giving up or moving away, I didn’t see Alan for a good couple of years. Then in 1995 by a chance combination of circumstances, I was invited to join a quiz league team in Neath, at the same time as starting to attend the Aberavon Rugby Club quiz. Alan was drafted into the league team, and on my recommendation, he started coming to the rugby club, playing with a different team. And I selfishly began measuring my progress as a quizzer against Alan, from playing with him in the league, and against him in the club. While I could hope at the time to one day maybe match him as a quizzer, I think I knew that I was never going to match him as a man. Alan was the kind of man about whom nobody ever had a bad word to say. He was humble, self-effacing and very, very good company. I took it all far too seriously, was far too competitive and could be a surly and miserable sod when in the wrong mood.

I really don't know why Alan never chanced his arm in a top level TV or radio quiz like Mastermind or Brain of Britain when he was in his late 70s/early 80s pomp. I don’t recall us ever talking that much about it. For whatever reason he just didn’t seem to fancy it. I think he was always more into playing within a team rather than as an individual quizzer. But he was always really encouraging to me, and truly delighted for me when Mastermind happened in 2007. In quiz terms, I think he saw something of himself as a quizzer in me. I was 24 when we first played together and he was in his 50s, I think. I was keen as mustard, and would have played in any quiz, any time, anywhere. I took it all really seriously and would sulk when I lost – so I’ve been told, Alan was the same in his younger days. And, blowing my own trumpet here, although I was raw, I had some talent for it. Alan certainly had talent for it.

Since the start of the 2010s, I have from time to time thought how nice it might be to be an unofficial quiz mentor to a younger quizzer in the way that Alan was for me. But this would, I thought, take a very special set of circumstances. For one thing, the local quiz scene is quite different from the local quiz scene in 1988. In the 1980s and the early-mid 1990s I played in quiz leagues in Neath, Swansea, Morriston, Llandeilo and Port Talbot. Every one of those leagues has folded. As far as I know, within a half hour’s drive from my home, only one league remains, in Bridgend. Yes, there are still pub quizzes. But I’ll be honest, I’m not convinced that pub quizzes offer the incentive to make yourself into a better quizzer. Not when there’s the possibility of getting beaten by phone cheats, however good you become. Not to mention the temptation of using your phone as a shortcut yourself. . .

Because you’d have to want to make yourself a better quizzer. You’d have to have this desire to win every quiz you entered. I have never entered a quiz and not wanted to win and not tried to win. I’ve entered a huge number of quizzes thinking that the chances of me winning are very slim, and I’ve lost a lot of quizzes in my time, but I’ve always wanted to do my best to win. And I think you’d have to have this desire in order to make yourself into a good quizzer, whether you have a mentor or not. Sad to say, a certain degree of quiz obsession helps.

So, here I am in 2022. I haven’t played in a serious quiz since the 2020 final of Brain of Mensa. It’s probably fair to say that I’m not the quizzer I was back in the noughties, and I wouldn’t say that I’m really quiz obsessed any longer. The only regular quiz in which I play is the rugby club’s Thursday night quiz. As I’ve mentioned in the past few months, the regulars in my team are my youngest daughter Jess, and my son in law Dan, and our friend Adam. All of them have taken their turn as question master recently. Then, last Saturday, Dan said to me out of the blue – you know what you said about connections for a quiz suddenly coming to you out of the blue? Well, it’s been happening to me, and I’ve been writing them down for my next quiz.- So what do you know? Maybe I am becoming a quiz mentor after all, without even realising it.