To Handout, or not to Handout?

You see, it was Paul’s turn to be question master last Thursday at the rugby club. I can’t say that I really know Paul. If I recall correctly, he didn’t do question master before the lockdown, or if he did, I didn’t play in one of his quizzes. That’s not important. What is important, to this post at leas, is that Paul doesn’t do a handout with his quiz.

Now, there are handouts, and then there are handout. The usual type of handout given in the Thursday night quiz is a picture handout. You know the sort – a single A4 sheet with between 20 and 30 faces of the famous and not so famous, the challenge being to correctly identify as many of them as possible. Now, yes, they vary in difficulty, and also in terms of the quality of reproduction of the photographs. But when it gets right down to it, they really just test your recognition. It’s very rare for the photos to be chosen because there are clues to the identity other than the person’s appearance. Okay, I could now get on my high horse here and start going on about how this isn’t really a quiz, but that’s just my own personal bias. Who is this? Is a valid question. I just don’t like them very much. I’m biased because I’m mediocre at best with a picture quiz. And also I guess that I don’t enjoy the level of challenge that they represent. But, certainly in the Thursday night quiz, people enjoy them, which is why I only rarely deviate from a picture handout when I’m question master. I might build in another level of challenge by having people whose surnames are all connected – American State Capitals was one of the more successful – but at the end of the day it’s just a picture quiz. 

My handout of choice would be something like Trevor Parry would produce (and maybe still does for all I know) for the Monday Night quiz in the Pill Harriers in Newport. Trev would do a picture quiz as well, but then before the last round you’d have a handout made up of questions like – Name all the countries with a coastline on the Black Sea – across a range of subjects. But then that was a quiz which regularly hosted some of the best quizzers in South Wales. How well that kind of handout would go down in the rugby club I can’t say, but I have my doubts. 

Coming back to Thursday then, for the reasons I’ve already gone into, I can’t say that I was sorry that there wasn’t a handout. There’s no quiz this Thursday, for the inexplicable reason that the rugby club have decided to host a rugby match on the same day. Whatever next? The quiz is rescheduled for tomorrow – but it’s too early in the week for me really. Time was I could go to the quiz in Newport on a Monday, drive 40 miles home, roll into bed around midnight and be okay to teach the next day. Not now. Shame.