Half and Half

So, the big question is – am I in a glass half full, or a glass half empty kind of mood, writing this? Let’s have a look at the glass half empty view. We got to the club on Thursday night to find that the question master was doing 8 themed rounds. Each team would have two jokers, to play before the start of whichever 2 rounds they chose, Now, this sort of thing is not my cup of tea really, for reasons I’ll explain shortly. Now let’s look at the glass half full point of view. It wasn’t as bad as I feared.

So, what’s wrong with themed and/or gimmicked quizzes? Well, although it is perfectly possible to make a very good quiz that is themed and/or uses gimmicks like jokers, it is difficult. It requires skill, patience and a capacity for taking pains with it, even if it means ripping up a round and starting again because it just doesn’t quite work. In my experience it is only very good question masters ( and most of these that I have known have also been good quizzers) who can pull this off.

Now, as I have said before, on a personal level I like all of the regular quiz setters in the club. But I’m afraid that I think that, with the exception of Dan, Adam and Jess, they are none of them much better than okay. That’s harsh and it maybe sounds mean-spirited. All of us who set the quiz for the club do it for nothing more than a couple of drinks and a desire to give people an evening’s entertainment. Well, there’s a scene in the film of Neil Simon’s semi-autobiographical “Biloxi Blues” where Matthew Broderick’s character - supposedly based on Simon himself – is made to read out his journal by other members of his training platoon, and he doesn’t want to read out what he has written about his friend Eugene, because he expresses the suspicion that he might be gay. (Look, the film is set during World War II) When he is reluctant to read it out, Eugene tells him, and I’m paraphrasing here – if he compromises on what he feels then he becomes a candidate for mediocrity. So, although I don’t necessarily like myself for saying it, this is really what I feel. And that is, that you should master the craft of putting together a good, basic general knowledge quiz on a regular basis before you try doing anything more complex.

Last night’s setter I have written about before. Starting with the negatives, Dan once nicknamed the setter Captain Slapdash and I can’t think of a more apt nickname. Why? Well, like me he’s been setting quizzes for the club for a long time now, and he’s been playing in the quiz for even longer than I have. So, over the years you hear certain questions again and again. You think you know what the answers are so when you use them yourself you can’t be bothered to check. In the sports round last night he asked ‘Who is the only track and field athlete to win gold medals in the same individual event in four consecutive Olympic Games? Now, you’ll probably have spotted the issue with this question. Because there are two athletes who have done this now. Yes, when I started quizzing the only one was Al Oerter who won the discus in 4 consecutive Olympic Games. But since then, Carl Lewis did the same in the Long Jump. It’s not hard to find this out but you have to check in the first place. It is not enough as a question master merely THINKING your answer is right. If you can’t, won’t or don’t accept this, then why are you making the quiz in the first place?

You know, when I started going to the quiz in the club 31 years ago, one of the things that used to really frustrate me – in fact it still does – is when a question master doesn’t pay enough attention to the phrasing of their question, and so doesn’t actually ask what they think they’re asking. Case in point – last night the second round on which we played our joker was ‘what came fourth?’. Except that it wasn’t. It was – which one is missing from this group of four? - Now, that’s okay, it’s just a small point. But one of the questions was - Which is missing from this list of America’s founding fathers? - This greatly annoys me. The Founding Fathers is, I believe a term applied to the signers of the US Declaration of Independence, and there were more than 4 of them! Now, from the list – Washington, John Adams, James Madison it was fairly clear that what he really meant was the first four US presidents, with the missing third president being Thomas Jefferson - but that isn’t what he asked for and I find it irritating

Which is a shame because with those couple of questions put to one side, he didn’t do a bad job of it at all. If you take the view that even in a themed round there should be as much variety as possible and something for everyone (and you should) then there was only one round where he fell short. This was the first one on Wales in the 21^st Century. Once what is essentially an ‘in the news’ question is more than a couple of years old you’re going to really struggle to recall the answers, and with one exception all of the teams had a low score on this round. In other rounds, though, the theme was not that much more than a rather general link which worked a lot better. For example, Wedding Anniversary Gifts was a round in which all of the answers contained a wedding anniversary gift even though that wasn’t what the question was actually about. This was nicely done – and we were kicking ourselves for not seeing that the answer to ‘what spans 9 provinces and 100 counties? – might be the Great Wall of China.

Continuing in glass half full vein, people do like ‘the captain’. He has a lot of charm as a question master and Dan has made the point that there is always a nice atmosphere at his quiz. And to be fair he did ask a number of questions that made you feel good for being able to dredge up an answer that you didn’t know if you still knew. For example, in the TV and film round all of the teams played their joker, but we were the only team to have a full house. I’m pretty sure that the question that did for the other teams was, “Who was played on TV by Mary Holland in the 50s and 60s?” It took a bit of thinking to dredge up Katie, the original Oxo Mum.

So you can’t complain too much if you end up being pleased with something you got right and something you could have got right but didn’t because you made the wrong call. And on that note it seems that the glass is definitely half full this time.