Why do you love Quizzing?

Sometimes, just sometimes, you play in a quiz that reminds you why you love quizzing.

On Thursday Adam from our team was question master. Now, it is true that I write in praise of Adam’s, Dan’s and Jess’ quiz more often than I ever write in praise of anybody else’s. But that’s because I do genuinely feel that they quizzes they’ve produced are clearly better than the quizzes produced by any of the other regular and semi regular setters.

It’s been a little while since any of us were question master and pretty much all of the quizzes in the club since have been a bit lacklustre for a variety of reasons that I’ve written about in the recent past in this very blog. I don’t plan to go on about this, because I’m still grateful that we have a quiz every week, and even if you are slapdash and careless about it, putting together a quiz takes mental energy.

But it does mean that for me, when Dan, Jess or Adam does a quiz at the club it tends to stand out a bit. Because, despite being amongst the least experienced quizzers at the club, they ‘get’ it. For one thing they all take into account the advanced average age of those taking part. For the number of times we get two regular question setters apologising to our team for asking entertainment questions from the 60s and the 70s, you couldn’t blame them for answering entertainment questions predominantly about the last 10 years and saying “I apologise to all of those of us who are old farts for asking this one”. But of course, they don’t. They go out of their way to make their quizzes accessible to all ages. Why? Because they get it – it being that the only reason for compiling the quiz in the first place is to give the teams an evening’s entertainment that they’ll enjoy.

What did I enjoy so much about Adam’s quiz? Well, for one thing there were no whythe’ells (as in why the ‘ell would anyone want to ask that question?) We only had one question wrong all evening, but that wasn’t because it was an easy quiz. No, it’s because all of the questions could succumb to logic if you really worked at them. As a team, we all played a blinder. With the picture quiz, it was all winners of the best actor Oscar in he last 60 years or so. Not all of them – 18 of them. We were pretty sure on all bar one, but again, it succumbed to the force of logic as we ticked off who it wasn’t, which led us to Jean Dujardin for The Artists – simply because if it wasn’t him, we couldn’t think who else it could possibly be.

And I guess that was the key to what I enjoyed so much. Unlocking the things we didn’t know for certain. Truffling out the answers. It’s one of the things I just love about quizzes. And as I said, it wasn’t that it was an easy quiz -which you could see from the scores of the rest of the teams – not trying to be harsh about it, but it’s a fact.