Saturday, 21 October 2023

Another quiz at the club - yawn, yawn.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s because we’re seven weeks into the new school year and I’m just knackered. Maybe it’s neither of these things. But, I don’t know, I just haven’t been enjoying the quiz down the club very much for the last couple of weeks.

Now, you know me. I can pick holes with the best of them. I’ve been known to take issue with a quiz or a question master for all of the following:-

·       Lazy slapdashery. Things like asking a question about Thomas the Tank Engine when it’s really about Ivor the Engine. Or about London Bridge when it’s really about Tower Bridge. The kind of questions where you can figure out what the question master has done, but it puts you in a quandary. You know what the QM should have said, so you know he correct answer as well. But do all of the other teams? You can’t count on it that they do. In that case, is it the ethical thing to do to go and point out the mistake to the QM so he can tell the other teams? I think so and I usually do it, but it make me look like a smug, arrogant know all. Not enjoyable.

·       Having a just plain wrong answer. For example, in a relatively recent quiz, the QM asked – how many Olympic Gold medals does Usain Bolt hold? The problem is that she had he answer to the question – how many Olympic medals was Usain Bolt presented with? She had taken it from an old quiz book, which didn’t acknowledge being stripped of a relay gold medal.

·       Boring questions. I know, I know. This is all in the eye of the beholder and the ear of the behearer. But there’s a certain type of question master who likes to write the kind of quiz which they themselves would be interested in and enjoy, but hardly anyone else would. For example we have an occasional setter we have nicknamed Science guy, because the vast majority of his questions are about just that. Then there is the kind of quiz where the majority of questions are of the ‘whytheell’ variety (as in ‘why the ‘ell would anybody ask a question like that?)The kind of question where there is no reason to expect that anyone would know the answer, there is no way of working it out if you don’t know it, and there is no satisfaction in it when the answer is revealed. At the other end of the scale, although I’ve often said that people never complain that a quiz is too easy, I do find very easy quizzes to be a bit of a bore as well.

·       We are all, at times, going to ask questions that are easier for some teams than others. It goes with the territory. But most of the question masters from other teams persist in asking a large proportion of questions about films, music, TV from the fifties and sixties. I’m fifty nine years old and I’m still one of the young whippersnappers at the quiz, so I know why they do it, but you know, it doesn’t really help when the QMs apologise to my team for doing it.

I probably shouldn’t even be saying all of this because nobody gets paid a penny for compiling a quiz for the club. We’re lucky to have any quiz every week. I wouldn’t want to compile a quiz for the club every week. Twenty plus years ago it would have been a different story – I would have loved to do it every week. Not now. I wouldn’t want to do it every month now. In fact I never volunteer for it, I wait to be asked, and if I don’t get asked that’s fine by me.

Anyway, I’m going to keep at it and see if I can recover a bit of enthusiasm for it.

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