That's Entertainment?

Here’s a peculiar thing about human beings. For all the amount of time that we spend moaning about things that we hate, it seems to me that we also spend a comparable amount of time moaning about things that we really love. For example, I think that I’ve mentioned before that I love the TV show Doctor Who. Well, let me tell you, there is nobody who moans more about Doctor Who than the real fans. Seriously, as a group of people it seems that nothing makes us happier than bemoaning how bad the show has become. Why? Because we’re the ‘real’ fans and that gives us the right to slag it off because we love it so much.

I use Doctor Who as an extreme example, but I also find that I’m a little prone to indulging in his kind of behaviour about another of my loves, namely quizzes. I only take part in five quizzes a month now (as opposed to five quizzes a week) and I’ll be honest, I do have to remind myself that this is meant to be fun, sometimes. Yes, in case you’re wondering, it was the monthly film quiz in the Gwyn Hall on Wednesday.

Right, let’s begin with some positives. The guys that run it really love their films, and they love their film quizzes. They put a hell of a lot of work into it as well. The second round is always a music round, where songs are speeded up, or slowed down or played backwards. The amount of effort that it must take to make just one of these music rounds is huge, I’m sure. So I’m not for one moment saying that they just shove the quiz together any old how. I’m no great shakes at film quizzes and I’m the weakest member of our team, but I usually enjoy the quiz, as I reckon the majority of players do.

On Wednesday, though, not so much. In the past, when I’ve moaned about this particular quiz it’s been about the ways that tie breaks have been settled, or the ‘prizes’ for winning the league, but not really about the quiz itself. However on Wednesday night, I felt that the organisers made a fundamental error. In any social quiz like this, the fundamental aim is to give people an evening’s entertainment. For the first time I really felt as if the compilers were not so much trying to produce an evening’s entertainment, as to hammer home how clever they are and how much more they know about films than the teams do.

It's just my opinion, of course, and by all means dismiss what I say as sour grapes because we tied in first place and lost the tie-break. The theme of the quiz was Disney movies. There were one or two questions about films made before 1989, but in all honesty it was mostly just about films made in the last twenty five years. So old sods like me who could give you chapter and verse about Disney’s first 60 years were pretty much excluded. Then there was the picture round. Stills from films, all of which were made no earlier than 1989 were shown. We had to put them in order of release. It complicated matters slightly since the organisers neglected to tell us that the years of release were the UK ones. Now, I have an issue with this kind of handout. Let’s suppose you had all of the films in the correct order in relation to each other, apart from the first. So you’d think 2 was 1, 3 was 2, and so on. Because of that one mistake, you’d get zero. I’m sorry, but I can’t get away from the feeling that whatever knowledge you manage to show, you should be rewarded for it.

While I’m at it, I know that a tie break has to be something that is definitely going to separate two teams. But it really doesn’t have to be a complete guessing game. Wednesday night’s tie breaker was ‘How many views on Youtube has the trailer for Snow White had? It was released about a month ago.

I don’t know, there was just a sort of feeling that came across in the quiz that we were all being subtly told – look how little you really know. It was there in a couple of things that the question masters said, especially when boasting about the difficulty of the handout. And that’s not fun. That’s not entertaining.