Principles be damned

Principles can be a dangerous thing to have.

I have always said that I will never not go to a quiz in the rugby club simply because I don’t like the quizzes from a particular setter. Yes I’ve missed quizzes because I’ve been ill or otherwise engaged. There was one setter whose quizzes I stopped going to because she made a very personal comment about me on the microphone. But there’s no one for whom I’ve said - they are so bad at this that I just can’t sit through another one of their quizzes. Even though I’ve wanted to say that.

Nobody who sets quizzes on a Thursday night in the Aberavon Rugby Club has ever tried to present themselves as a professional quiz master. Nobody has, to the best of my knowledge, received anything more than a couple of drinks for doing the quiz. You have to respect that.

But.

As much as I do really like last night’s setter as a person, his quiz was awful. Seriously dire and not even in a ‘so bad it has a certain ironic enjoyability ‘ way either. Our question setter committed many of what I would call simple yet serious blunders, all guaranteed to turn the evening into an unentertaining slog. We had:-

Some very turgid questions requiring very specific knowledge – for example How many metres in a nautical mile? If you’re going to ask a question like that, at least make it a multiple choice to give people a chance

Some questions where the answer did not match the questions as they were asked. For example – which three countries have capital cities whose capital city is less than 400 miles from Mount Everest? Check the wording of that question again. Okay – we put down Nepal, Tibet (which you can argue is not a country because it is not currently an independent sovereign state rightly or wrongly ) and Bhutan. Answer given – Kathmandu, Lhasa, Thimphu. He had asked for the countries, yet gave the capitals for the answer.

In two rounds he had to leave a question out at the end of the round because he had already asked it in a previous round. Once is careless. Twice – supply your own adjective.

He has difficulty pronouncing or reading his own questions. His very idiosyncratic way of doing this sometimes renders even straightforward questions much more difficult.

He would ask quite a few questions with multiple answers – for example, name the 4 chemical elements named after the Swedish town of Ytterby – and then only award 1 point if you had all 4. When challenged about the fairness he fell back on the ‘It’s my quiz!’ argument. I’ll be honest, that was the point where I really lost any sympathy for him. When you’re a question master it is NOT about you using and abusing your little bit of power. It is supposed to be about providing everyone else with an evening’s entertainment. Full stop.

There was a bit of a feeling of ‘couldn’t be arsed’ about some of his questions. He asked for a boxer’s nickname and when I pointed out he had more than one he replied ‘I know but I couldn’t remember the other.’ Which just shows that he couldn’t be arsed to google it when compiling the quiz. There really is no excuse for not checking your answers.

It’s difficult to be sure but I don’t think that the other teams, except possibly his own, are that fond of his quizzes. The poor guy was supposed to do this quiz three weeks ago, but he was ill. Now, back when it was announced that he would be doing the quiz, none other than Captain Slapdash himself called out ‘I can feel a headache coming on next Thursday!’ implying he wanted to avoid it. Now, okay, you might not like his quizzes but I think that’s unnecessarily rude, especially bearing in mind the crap that the Captain himself so often produces in his own quizzes. Whatever you think of the quiz, the tradition is that at the end of the quiz, after the QM has signed off, one of the audience will shout thank you  (supply name here)! And everyone will give them a round of applause. Last night no one else seemed to want to issue thanks so I shouted it, and hardly anyone joined me in a round of applause. In a way I understand, but again, it is a bit rude.

Now, if it was me, I wouldn’t mind anyone coming up to me and telling me what was wrong with my own quiz. We would talk about it calmly and rationally, I would explain the beauty and brilliance of the quiz they had just been fortunate enough to participate in and in the end we would agree that I was right and they were wrong. But there’s just no way I can do it with anyone else. Even though, in this case, I just don’t think the setter is cut out to be question master for a pub quiz. Not everyone is. We can’t all be brain surgeons. We can’t all be formula 1 drivers. We certainly can’t all teach. It’s nothing to be ashamed of if that’s not where your skills lie. Read the room and call it a day. But I can’t actually tell him that.

The trouble is, despite everything, I still probably take quizzes too seriously. If I didn’t then last night’s quiz would just have been the best part of two hours’ tedium. But I get so frustrated with bad quizzes that I honestly don’t think I can deliberately go through an evening like that again.

Principles be damned.