Quiz Double Header

I should probably have told you about last Sunday a little earlier than this. In my own defence it has been another hectic week, what with Year 11’s Prom night on Tuesday. Well, on Sunday I did something which I’m pretty sure I’ve never done before. I attended two completely different quizzes in two different venues on the same day. Of course, if you attend a Grand Prix event you get several different quizzes all on the same day, but then they are all part of the same event and held in the same venue. On Sunday I played in two separate pub quizzes in two separate pubs.

It came about because John happened to find out that a pub in which he and Lynne occasionally go for a meal is starting up a quiz, and had decided to have the first on Sunday. At 6pm. I’ll be honest, I don’t really know the thinking behind the decision to hold it so early on a Sunday evening, but I’ve no doubt that they had their reasons. The great thing about this was that it meant playing in it was a no-loss situation. What I mean by this is that if we were to try a different quiz later in the evening on a Sunday, then we’d have to give up going to the Dyffryn Arms. Now, we know that the quiz in the Dyffryn Arms will always be enjoyable, and many times it will be excellent. Not this coming Sunday, mind, since I’m the question master, but you can’t have everything. So what that means is that you might go to try out another quiz, find it’s not much good, and have a rotten evening when you could have been playing in a good quiz in the Dyffryn. Whereas by playing at 6pm we knew that even if the quiz was rotten, then we’d still have plenty of time to get over to the quiz in the Dyffryn as well.

Well, it certainly wasn’t rotten. I’ll be honest, like a lot of question masters who make their own quizzes, the guy who set the quiz seemed to have a huge bias towards entertainment questions. There were two handouts. The first meant that you had to identify some faces from the world of entertainment, and some films from their posters, where the titles had been blanked out. For the second handout we had cryptic clues to the names of bands – for example – Armada Oak Overcoat = Fleetwood Mac. On top of that we had a round on slogans from TV adverts, a round called Kids Stuff – which was almost entirely on Kid’s TV – and a round on Entertainment and Sport. Which left just Science and Nature and Pot Luck – and even some of the Pot Luck questions were on Entertainment. So put it this way – if you had every question that wasn’t about Entertainment right, but weren’t at least proficient at Entertainment, then you were going to end up right at the bottom of the field.

Well, alright, I can see that I’m in danger of taking off on one of my hobby horses here. I understand that, as with picture rounds, people like entertainment questions. But enough is enough, and in what’s supposed to be a general knowledge quiz, once you get to having half, or more than half of the points being solely for that one category, then you’ve surely crossed over into the realms of the specialist quiz. Still, enough of that. We did have a chat with the QM when he came over to give us the prize at the end and he did say that they were thinking about doing the next one a bit later in the evening. All of which means that this small scale achievement might well remain as a one off. Still, I have to say that I quite enjoyed it. I’d guess that the ultimate would be to play in more than one quiz in more than one country on the same day. Can it be done? Probably. Has it been done? Over to you.