To rota or not to rota? Some thoughts.

I mentioned in my previous post that last night Dan was question master for the rugby club quiz, and next week will be his wife Jessica, my daughter. What I didn’t mention was that in a fortnight it will be Adam from our team as well. Now, bear in mind that the only other more than once a year setters are Dai Norwich, Howard, Anne, Paul and . . . er. . . me. So as a team, we provide half of the regular setters.

This led to Adam and me discussing this issue last night. You see, as many of our gentle readers will know, putting a quiz together for an evening can be enjoyable, but if you’re taking care and doing it properly it takes time and care. As I’ve often said, when you do take time and trouble over it you can still end up making mistakes, but when you take the time to do it as well as you can you’re much more likely to give people a better evening’s entertainment. All for a round of drinks.

Of the five regular teams, four of them supply a question master from time to time. Adam raised the point of view that it would be better and fairer if there was a rota system and each team took it in turns to provide the quiz. I’ve written about this before, I recall, but coming back to it my answer is – yes, in a perfect world. But it’s not a perfect world. In our particular circumstances there are problems with a rota system.

One of them is tradition. We’ve never had a formal rota system and we’ve never insisted that every team produce a quiz. Now, I’ve been to quizzes where the setters volunteer, like ours. I’ve been to quizzes where it’s understood that all teams take turns to set the quiz. I’ve even been to quizzes where it’s understood that the winners set the next week’s quiz. There’s good things about each of these, but the main thing is, that it’s understood. I don’t think, after all these years, you could change things just like that. I may be wrong but I’m guessing that at least some of the regulars would say that what we’ve been doing for the last 30 odd years has worked perfectly well, so why change now?

Another of them would be the effect. Dai Norwich is worried, not without reason, that this might put people off from coming, if by doing so it commits them to compiling a quiz. We’re pretty stable with five teams, but if even two teams stopped coming, then I think it would kill the quiz.

Even if all the teams agreed – and I don’t think for one minute it would work unless we all discussed the idea and agreed unanimously – even if we did I think there might still be some problems. Making a quiz is a craft. No, listen, it is. It’s not just a matter of slinging down 80 questions onto a piece of paper. The way we do things in the club is we allow anyone to make a quiz. This means that every now and again, someone different will have a go. Sometimes it works. Sometimes they produce something which really isn’t at all enjoyable. But if it’s only once a year, you can live with it. When it’s more regular, though, well, what happens is what happened with Reg.

Reg was a lovely fellow. He was a regular member of one of the teams. Out of the blue one day he asked Brian, the organiser at the time, if he could be question master. As per established practice Brian agreed, and Reg did his quiz. It really wasn’t very good. Nothing daunted Reg persisted. Did his quizzes ever get much better? No. Did his quizzes get any more popular? Very much so. Not because of the questions. Reg was very inaccurate, added to which he was a notorious malaprop, and so you were always guaranteed some unintentional laughs. I say unintentional, but after a while I began to suspect that Reg was doing some of them deliberately.

Whatever the case, Reg became popular, and people looked forward to his turn as a question master. Now at that time I was far more critical of question masters at the club than I am now and Reg’s quizzes were lots of the things I hate. Thankfully as soon as I saw how much people were enjoying his evenings I decided to keep my opinions to myself.

I was not the only one, though, who did not like the actual quizzes that Reg compiled. Actually, I say quizzes, in the plural, but . . .  We all reuse questions from time to time, but Reg took this to absurd extremes. In particular he had one photograph handout which he continually reused. There was one particular photograph and Reg would always say it was someone different. It started off as Whitney Houston, then next time he announced the same picture was Naomi Campbell, then the next time Beyonce. I think at one or other point he may even have said she was Julia Roberts, Dame Judi Dench and Benjamin Disraeli.

As I said, there was a regular team who didn’t see the funny side of this. They too thought in their hearts of hearts that his quizzes were lazy, slapdash and far too inaccurate and we noticed that they stopped coming whenever it was Reg’s quiz.

We can argue about whether they should have done this or not. Still, what would worry me would be that if someone who didn’t want to compile a quiz and was only doing so because it was their team’s turn would produce a similarly bad quiz and so teams might vote with their feet every time this team set a quiz.

As always, just my opinion, feel free to disagree.