No doubt in my mind - we are the best.

Well, dearly beloved, it’s my quiz in the Rugby Club on Thursday, and it was my daughter Jess’ turn last Thursday. I confess to the sin of pride here, because I certainly take pride in the fact that Jess – and also the other regulars of my team all produce better quizzes than anyone else in the club. Yeah, I know, of course this is something I am going to be accused of bias about. But when it comes to quizzes, I try to be strictly objective in my judgements. And I stand by what I say.

I don’t know how much time and effort other QMs apart from my team put into their quizzes. It’s certainly not my place to start laying down the law about how much time and effort they should. We all of us do it just for the love of the game, and for a couple of drinks on the evening. But when it comes to other QMs, however much time and care they put in, on many occasions it appears not to have been enough, or to have been misdirected. They end up giving us something that is just not as satisfying as it could be. How?

Well, for one thing there’s the little matter of making sure your answer as QM is right. Yes, as Question Master you always have the power to fall back on the line ‘The question master is always right.” But you shouldn’t abuse this. I believe that with great power comes great responsibility. I believe that it does not give you the right to dispense with checking whether the answers that you have written down are actually correct. One of our question masters is so prone to giving out wrong’uns that my team has unkindly but accurately dubbed him Captain Slapdash. I doubt that any of the others are as meticulous in checking as Jess and my guys are.

Then there’s making sure that your question is right as well. I know that as an ex-English teacher I can come across as pedantic about the ways that questions are phrased, but it does make a difference. For example, we were once asked, “What is the name of the English actor who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in Ben Hur? Well, the thing is that the actor was Welsh, Hugh Griffith. Ah well – said the QM – you all knew that I meant British. On Thursday Jess asked – to which plant family do chives belong? Now, my thought was, does she mean the scientific name – allium – or is she looking for the answer the onion family? And I was so delighted that she had anticipated this when she gave the answer – allium – but I will accept onion. It doesn’t take a lot to anticipate the problems a question might raise, but so many QMs really don’t. It’s the mark of a good QM when they do.

Then there’s the simple thing of recognising that your purpose as question master in a pub quiz is not to show an audience how clever you are, but to give all the people playing an evening’s entertainment. Yes, gimmicks can help with this – Jess used House of Games type Rhyme Time in the handout and Answer Smash in one of the rounds. But the best gimmick of all is interesting questions. An interesting question is one which you MIGHT know, which you MIGHT be able to work out, or at the least, which MIGHT make you say – that’s interesting – when you hear the answer. Which obviously doesn’t include crap like “On which date did King Charles III lose his first baby tooth?” – things which nobody is going to know, or derive any pleasure from knowing. I loved it that Jess was confident enough to ask things like – Which US State has the nickname The Old Line State? I didn’t KNOW the answer, but I thought that maybe this was a reference to the Mason Dixon Line, which narrowed it down to Pennsylvania or Maryland. I felt that the state on the southern side would be more likely which meant Maryland. Good question.

Some of my closest quiz pals from the start of my career have sadly passed away since, but I can still remember them agreeing that bad quizzers make bad quizzes, because they are not good enough to know what a good question is. I’ve no doubt that the fact that Jess and the Boys are becoming better quizzers all the time is one of the reasons why they have such consistency that they never do a bad quiz. But I also think it’s because they care about it. I know from speaking to them that they all reflect on what went well and if a particular question didn’t work so well after each quiz. A lot more than I myself do now, if truth be told. I’m not a very good example to anyone setting quizzes now because I don’t care that much whether I set a quiz or not. 30 years ago I was as keen as mustard, road tested every quiz at least once before using it and held a detailed post mortem afterwards. Well, there you go. In the words of Sam Goldwyn, we’ve all passed a lot of water since then.

Well done Jess. I am always proud of you anyway, but I enjoyed Thursday’s quiz.