Make Way for the Captain

Thursday evening also saw the last of three weeks in a row when participants at the club have been fortunate enough to play in quizzes set by members of my team. A fortnight ago was mine, last week was my daughter Jess’ and Thursday was my son in law Dan’s. Three weeks of quality quizzing. The quiz before mine was Dai’s quiz, and he’s my favourite of the question masters from other teams. He still drops a clanger from time to time but by and large he’s pretty reliable.

Which is more than I can say about this week’s scheduled question master for it’s none other than Captain Slapdash himself. The most frustrating thing about the Captain is that he is capable of composing some really interesting and well thought out questions. However he is every bit as capable of dropping huge and avoidable clangers. I’ve written about this before  - basically I mean wrong answers, wrong questions, and mistakes that would be so easy to avoid if he only checked –

Whether what he thinks he is asking is actually what he is asking

Whether the answer he thinks is right is actually right.

It’s pretty basic stuff and you can’t skimp on the checking if you want your quiz to be as correct as it can possibly be. I can’t believe that the Captain does check his stuff  like this. I don’t even think he can read it through when it’s completed. Let me give you an example I’ve given more than once – he once asked us “What is the connection between The last King of Libya and Thomas the Tank Engine?” To which the answer is – there probably isn’t one. The last king of Libya was King Idris, while Idris the Dragon featured in some episodes of Ivor the Engine, not Thomas the Tank Engine.

These last four weeks have also been the four weeks in which we have used the swap your answers marking policy. And no, the suspect team did not turn up again on Thursday. As I said, I don’t want them run out of the quiz and I don’t want to have them feel as if they’re being made an example of. But if we are going to play in the quiz, I just want to be able to feel that the scores we all report are kosher. Time will tell. They’ll either come back or they won’t, and if they do then they’ll either play or they won’t. I can’t help saying that I hope they do. I’d like to know if my suspicions are correct or completely unfounded.