Film Quiz

Look, I was just in a very grumpy mood when I wrote this yesterday. Here goes: - 

 I am currently sitting in a theatre on a school INSET day, listening to the ‘expert’ in a particular field. His first mistake was to discard the microphone he was offered. He thinks his voice is perfectly clear and carries to the middle and back of the auditorium. He is wrong. We are sitting around large round tables. I currently have 11 people around mine. He keeps stopping, and I’m guessing that he is asking us to discuss things, judging by the fact that everyone else in the group starts talking. At the same time. I hear snatches of three or four conversations each time. I feel somewhat like I am being beaten over the head with a blunt instrument today.

Which brings me to Wednesday night’s quiz. I enjoyed Wednesday night’s quiz – always do, even though I very rarely provide more than one or two answers. It’s a film quiz, you see. Wednesday night’s theme was movie villains. And we played an absolute blinder. I say we. I had a couple and that was that for me. There’s one quiz every month – with no quiz in August. Of the 8 quizzes so far this year we’ve won 6, tied for first place in another, and been second in the other. This year as well as the individual quizzes it’s being run as a league. Now, on Wednesday night we won by something like 18 points, or put it another way, we could have not played the last round and still won by 8. It’s our biggest win this year, possibly our biggest win ever.

There is a certain irony to this. There are several guys who run the quiz. Most of them we get on with fine, but there’s one of them who makes no secret of the fact that he is extremely frustrated that we win the majority of quizzes. Well, on Wednesday night, as we were in the queue for drinks, this particular guy passed us in the queue. Jess and I turned to each other and at exactly the same time said, “That’s ruined his night.”

If you play in quizzes and you win quite regularly then you’ll have experienced some unpleasantness from other teams or question masters I’m quite sure. On Thursday night Dan said he’d been told that the organisers are considering introducing a handicap system. Hmm. Personally, I would hope that if they do they will hang on until after December, and the end of the league. Changing things before the league ends, somehow that’s not quite cricket.

I have mixed feelings about handicaps. On the positive side, the more teams that take part in a quiz the better as far as the host venues are concerned, and without the venue you can’t have a quiz. I would imagine that playing in a quiz where you know you have a chance of winning is more fun than playing in a quiz where you know that you have no realistic chance of winning. Okay. On the negative side – I don’t really want to say this now, because I don’t come across very well for saying it. But what the hell? The nasty, too serious about the whole thing side of me says – handicaps reward you for not being very good at it. Handicaps remove any incentive to get better at it, and if winning matters that much to you, then you ought to be prepared to put in a bit of effort to get better at it. On a more practical note, I think it’s difficult to do handicaps fairly. Trevor Parry in Newport, who is as good a question master as you are ever going to meet, started using handicaps in his Monday quiz which I used to attend. It was a constant source of frustration to me – even as great a setter as Trevor seemed to have no discernible system of handicapping, just plucking the figures out of thin air each week. Some nights I just wanted to get up and walk out after he announced the handicaps, because we’d be starting so far off the pace there would be no chance of winning, even if we comfortably outscored everyone else.

Well, that’s just me, and I know I do take it all too seriously. If I lived closer to Newport then I’d consider going again, but I cannot in all conscience do a 40 minute journey back on a school night now, even with handicaps.

On the other hand, I would not even make a 40 second journey to a bingo quiz. Bingo quizzes are a firm fixture in the drawer I have labelled ‘NOT FOR ME’. I can’t cope with the idea that you might get all the answers in the quiz right (unlikely but not impossible) and still not win. Quizzing is a broad church, and we can’t all like the same things. If you regularly go to a bingo style quiz and you enjoy it, then good luck to you. As I say, it’s not for me.