A Couple of 'Quiz Truths'

I have, I believe, one more Thursday night quiz before I’m off to Alicante for a couple of weeks. Don’t blub, I’ll be back on the 18^th, and then things will soon start picking up. The BBC website isn’t yet saying when University Challenge will start, but it usually begins in August. Last year Mastermind began at the end of August as well, so there’s plenty to look forward too.

So, what are my talking points for this week? There’s two of them, as it happens. The first concerns the rugby club quiz on Thursday night. No surprise there. We had a new question master this week. Well, new to me, anyway. He may well have done one during my lost weekend. Now, the tradition in the club is that if you express a desire to compile a quiz and be question master, then you will get your opportunity to do it. That’s the way it has worked in the 27 or so years since I started, and doubtless was the way of things before I ever played there. Between you, me and the gatepost the organiser did a couple of weeks ago try to persuade members of my team to compile the quiz, so that he could delay the question master in question. We gave him rather short shrift if truth be told and poured a modicum of scorn upon him for such an immoral suggestion.

So, last Thursday was the turn of the new QM, then. It was a fascinating evening. I think that the organiser’s cold feet were due to the fact that the chap doing the quiz seems very much to be a Science specialist. In practice, this meant that there was an awful lot of Science in Thursday’s quiz. There is a problem with Science questions. I remember Bamber Gascoigne being interviewed for a documentary for one of UC’s big anniversaries, and saying that they always found Science questions rather problematical. Not so much in terms of making them fair for the teams, but in making them of significant interest to the majority of the audience who are trying to play along at home. You may recall that a feature of most if not all of my UC reviews is me awarding myself a lap of honour around the sofa when I get a Science question right. I’d argue that much other than basic Science is not really part of the huge body of commonly held general knowledge in the way that some other subjects are.

It didn’t really help that he accompanied almost all of the Science questions with observations like ‘this is common knowledge’ or ‘you all know this’. Well, a significant number of questions I’m afraid it was a case of – not it isn’t – and – no we don’t -. It wasn’t just that there were some difficult (for us) Science questions, but there were so many Science questions. It would have been either the second or third round, after four or five ‘head-scratchers’ in a row one of the teams next to us turned round to us and mouthed ‘what the hell?’ at each other. And the thing about having a disproportionate amount of Science questions, is that it means you lose out on other, shall we say, more popular topics. For example, after the quiz Dan and I couldn’t come up with more than 1 sport question that was asked, and 1 entertainment question that was asked all evening.

Coming away from the quiz, Jess compared it to a school exam, and I know where she’s coming from with it. However well you prepare for a public exam, they’re not really enjoyable experiences. On the other hand though, perversely I rather enjoyed the whole thing. It was difficult. It was some way outside of the normal quiz experience at the club, and there were a couple of really rather good questions in amongst the rest. Granted, I can’t dredge any specific examples up off the top of my head, but they were there. Since returning to the quiz last August, the only quizzes I’ve missed were ones where I was out of the country. There are question masters whose quizzes we don’t like very much, but we wouldn’t insult them by not turning up. So if the QM from Thursday did another quiz, we’d turn up anyway. But in this case, I wouldn’t even consider not playing. It was a challenge, and sometimes that’s not a bad thing at all.

I did promise you a second talking point. Here it is. When I saw my son Mike yesterday I had a chat with him about the Tuesday night quiz in Coity, Bridgend that he plays in. If you’re a regular reader you may recall that I’ve played with him there a couple of times when members of his team couldn’t make it. They’ve been on an extended winning run, exacerbated last week by the way they won all of the spot prizes along the way as well.

As you’d maybe expect, there’s an increasingly frosty atmosphere towards them from the other teams, and Mike said that a couple of weeks ago, there was a large amount of topical current affairs questions. One member of one of the other teams – or indeed it may even have been the question master – passed a comment to the effect that he didn’t expect a young team to be so good on politics. I say young – Mike is 34 and I presume that the other teams members would be round about the same age. But in terms of that quiz – or the rugby club quiz for that matter – that’s very young. But as Mike pointed out, between the team they cover an awful lot of ground – not least because one of them is a BBC Wales journalist.

As I say, it did make me think for a minute about my own prejudices. Because I have to be honest, if there was a team of guys about Mike’s age who came to the club and went on a long winning spree, I would start having dark thoughts about conspiracies. I’m trying very hard not to act like I used to in the quiz, but old habits die hard.

I suppose when you take both last week’s quiz at the club, and what was said to Mike into account, then you can use them to illustrate a couple of ‘quiz truths’. When you take on the role of compiler, you should always remember the purpose of the quiz – namely, to provide everyone else with an evening’s fun and entertainment. Your own preferences for questions, and your own special interests should be the last thing you consider, not the first. The other point is that setting a particularly difficult quiz – whether deliberately to ‘spike the guns’ of a specific team or not – usually plays into the hands of the best team, and ensures that they win by a greater margin than normal. It’s the particularly easy quizzes that are the great levellers.