It was my turn to be question master in the club last Thursday. It has been an incredibly stressful week – I won’t go into details – and I did consider whether I needed to cry off. I had several offers to do the quiz for me under the circumstances. But I made the decision to do it.
31 years ago I introduced the concept of the connections
question to the quiz, having stolen the idea from an open quiz I’d attended in
Neath. I tend to use them whenever I do a quiz at the Rugby Club – between 3
and five seemingly unconnected questions in a round, and the teams have to
decide what connects the answers. Now in the last round I always do a nine part
connection. When I was making the quiz, I found that the lyrics of Billy Joel’s
“We Didn’t Start the Fire” are a treasure trove of question sources. So much so
that not only did I use them in a nine part connection for the last round but I
also used them for a nine part connection for round four, the last before the
half time break.
Now, as the papers were being handed back after the last
round, one of the players made quite an audible comment that this was an unfair
connection. Now, in one way, I can kind of see where he was coming from. After
all, if nobody in your team knew the song very well, then not only were you
going to be unable to answer one connection, you were going to be unable to
answer two. But I couldn’t take the criticism quite as philosophically as that
because of the person making the criticism. It was none other than Captain Slapdash.
I called out to him that I felt that this was a case of the pot calling the
kettle black and left it at that.
You see, the good Captain will persist in using his own
connections questions. And the problem is that although capable of coming up
with the occasional connection so good that I wish that I’d come up with it
myself, his general slapdashery means that a lot of his connections are pretty
poor, and for want of a better word – cheats. I’ll try my best to explain that.
I don’t know if everybody works this way, but the way I do
it is to come up with what I think is a good idea for a connection. Then I have
to find, or improvise questions that have answers that fit the connection. If I
cannot quite make at least three that perfectly fit the connection, then I bin
it. The captain doesn’t work like that. So many of his connections use answers
that might be close to the connection, but don’t actually work. For example,
the Captain often uses connections of US state Capitals. One time one of the
questions leading there was – which actress won the Best Actress Oscar for her
role in The Queen? Who of course was HELEN Mirren. Well, Captain, there ain’t no
US Capital called Helen. Or Mirren for that matter. Well, as far as the Captain
was concerned Helen is close enough to HELENA, and what the hell, he couldn’t
be arsed to create a question about, say, Helena Bonham Carter , which actually
would have worked. Or the time that he got mixed up between Thomas the Tank Engine
and Ivor the Engine that I’ve written about several times before. I mean I do feel that if you've made a quiz at the club you have more right to criticise than someone who has never tried, so I give the Captain that much, but it just rankled with me that someone who has perpetrated more bad connection sets at the club than the rest of us put together would criticise mine.
So hopefully you can understand why I was feeling a little
prickly about someone with his track record criticising my connections. Never
mind.
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