Never on Sunday take two

Jess and Dan popped round about 6pm yesterday.  They said they were going to a local quiz we’ve never been to before at 8 and would I like to join them. Now, had it been tonight instead I would probably have declined, since I’m off on this summer’s sketching trip in the early hours of tomorrow morning. It’s a mega trip too – 2 nights in Dublin, then five nights in New York City, then one more night in Dublin. Combined 60^th birthday and retirement present, and the reason why I won’t be posting on Quizzy Monday 12^th August for quite a few days. However, I digress and back to last night.

Now, I haven’t mentioned where it was and to be honest I don’t think I’m going to. Yes, I am going to be churlish and negative about it. You see, it somehow managed to be much less than the sum of its parts and for anyone wanting to make their own quiz and host their own quiz it was an interesting demonstration of the pitfalls that you can fall into if you’re not careful.

Timing

We players last night got a lot for our money – which was £1 per player as it happened. See what you think. We were given – a handout with 20 dingbats representing superheroes. Another handout with 20 dingbats representing book titles. Another handout with 12 questions in two groups, both of which were linked by connections. Then four rounds of 20 general knowledge questions each. As a rule of thumb I like more questions rather than fewer questions so this was fine by me. Okay. The thing is though, it does make it necessary to run a pretty tight ship in order to get through it all in a reasonable time. Last night’s QM didn’t start handing anything out until gone 20 past eight, and then he allowed what must have been a good half hour to allow teams time to do all the handouts. Then there was a long break after two rounds. Then another long break between round four and swapping the papers. I would say you could have trimmed anything up to an hour off the quiz and it would have been better for it.

Bad Questions

In which year – yes, there are only so many times you should ever ask an ‘in which year’ question in one evening. One seems optimum to me. There were too many in his one.

What name did so and so and such and such give their baby?

How many eggs does an average hen lay in a given year?

Funnily enough the answer to all of those questions is who bloody cares? Test my knowledge by all means but don’t ask me to play guessing games.

Wording of Questions

If you’ve played in a range of quizzes with different question masters then you’ll know that some are better at this than others are. Last night’s was certainly not the worst. But he really wasn’t great. Case in point – what is the correct full name of the character played by David Jason in Only Fools and Horses. The answer he gave – Del Boy Trotter. Now the thing is he asked for the CORRECT Full name. Hey look, I’ve been around a bit so I put Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter, but there was a bit of a furore and I have to say I was on the protestors’ side. He made it worse when he tried to say that he had made it clear that he wanted the Del Boy name – he didn’t. Not quite as bad as Dai Norwich insisting that Genesis had recorded “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” because , and I quote “I was listening to it earlier today.” Not far off though.

See what you think of this one. Which University was attended by Stephen Hawking? Right here’s the facts – he did his bachelor’s degree at University College Oxford, and his PhD at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. So the correct answer is both. Which is what I put. What’s more I even specified he did his first degree at Oxford and his PhD at Cambridge, What answer did the QM give? Cambridge. In a way I could have understood it if he’d said Oxford, being his first.

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Now, before I make my last point, I’d better explain that we did actually win. Our original score was given as 94. – Are you sure? – I asked the team that marked it. They sheepishly realised that they had not added on a handout score, which gave us 114. Bearing in mind the difficulty of the dingbats and connections – and we only dropped two points on them all – I felt we’d probably win comfortably. No, the second placed team had 111. There are a number of explanations – I don’t know he quiz well enough to suggest how they might have done so well.

a)There isn’t a very thriving competitive quiz scene in Port Talbot and surroundings but it’s possible that he other team are just a very good team who only play in his quiz.

b)Its quite possible that the same questions get recycled a lot in this quiz, so what might be difficult to newbie teams might be very well known to the regulars.

c)Maybe there was what we could euphemistically call some sympathetic marking between teams.

Who knows? Not me. Cheating? Not impossible, certainly, especially bearing in mind there was a cash prize, but if anyone was cheating they didn’t do THAT good a job of it.

However, despite winning the money I think that all four of us were rather disappointed. I’ve made some suggestions why in the comments above. Personally I think it was more the timing and the funereal pace than anything. I much prefer it when a QM is well versed in the fine art of getting the hell on with it.