An Unexpected Win

I strolled into the Centre last Monday afternoon, idly looking forward to what is one of the better days thrown up this year by my timetable, and pleasantly anticipating the quiz which would take place later that night. Then disaster struck, or so it seemed. Monday begins for me with a free period, in which I help solve people's computer problems, and when not doing that, grapple with the latest version of Powerpoint, on which I am hoping to have a Christmas quiz ready in time for the final week of term, just three weeks away now. I had just bought a coffee and was considering having a cigarette when the substitution secretary dashed in and informed me that my colleague Teresa, a bilingual young lady whom I am very fond of, had had to rush off to deal with some problem at home, and I had to take her class. So the coffee and the fag were perforce abandoned as I rapidly collected the materials I would need, though the class itself were mainly some students I had last year, so it was actually quite nice to be with them again. One little setback, not too bad. But then I repaired to the smoking room in the next break, where five of the six members of the quiz team (me included) are to be found, and was informed by John that he was busy writing an essay for some course he is doing, so he wouldn't be along that night. And I already knew that Tony was unlikely to be along as he was in great pain following tooth extractions, and couldn't move his jaw. Things looked a little worrying. And new quizmasters that night too. An Australian lady who has been attending the quiz for about a year was doing her debut stint asking the questions, along with her American team-mate, a young lady from Iowa, as it turned out.

However, first of all Tony let it be known that despite being unable to communicate except by sign language, and having to sip his Coca Cola (not allowed booze yet) through a straw, he would be coming along, and then John said that he would get up early the next morning to write his essay, and confine his drinking to orange-juice and lemonade, so in the end we were at full strength. It was, inevitably, a trifle out of the ordinary as quizzes go, with questions about Iowa and a whole round on Australia, but you could hardly say we were surprised by this. There were also references to US cultural icons like old-time comedians that no-one had heard of, but those of us who have actually set questions in our quiz in the past cheerfully overlooked this, as it is bloody difficult to get the right balance.

The big difference between our quiz and local pub quizzes in Britain or the US, or even Australia, if they have them there, is that you cannot assume a common background in culture, by which I do not mean that all questions have to be so easy that everyone can answer them, but that the questions have to be about things that people could have had access to, unlike, say the US comedian just mentioned, whose fame had not travelled beyond his own territorial boundaries (in the same way Americans tend not to have heard of Britain’s Kenneth Williams).

Of the almost 40 people taking part in the quiz the other night, around ten were Spanish; two Australian; two American; about sixteen English and five or six Irish. When setting questions for a roomful of people like this, you can't, for example, rely on British television as a source of questions, as most English pub quizzes seem to do. There is no way you can ask who plays somebody-or-other in Eastenders or Coronation Street, or ask who the latest participants in I'm a Nonentity, Get Me Out of Here are, although you do occasionally get questions about the Spanish equivalent of this. Mostly though, people recognise that if you like going to quizzes in pubs in the evenings, you probably aren't going to spend your time watching crap television.

So, the six English guys who form our team probably had as good a chance as any, and yet with seven rounds gone, and the one remaining round having the expected title of 'Australia', we found ourselves with 97 points, five behind the leaders, our eternal rivals, Luis's team. And Luis is brilliant at Geography. But the questions were not all that geographical, although there was one about what was unusual about the town of Cooper Pedy (built underground, as Tony attempted to mime to us, but ended up by jotting down), and when the final scores were announced, we had caught our rivals and were now level with them on 107 points. This meant a tiebreaker. For this, three questions are put and the two teams who are level write down their answers in the hope that one will get more right than the other. The first question, I recall, asked what the initials IBM stand for. Having once worked for them, I knew this, as did Tony, and as also did a young man not in either of the tying teams who, under the impression that the spot-prize phase had begun, started to yell out the answer before we all shut him up. The second question was some modern popular culture thing that was meaningless to me, (well do you know who Clubba Lang is?) but one of the boys knew it, and this was what made the difference, as Luis's team didn't. Victory for us, and the princely sum of €7.50 each. We even managed three spot prizes between us, as well.

Mind you, as we always say, it's not the winning, it's the taking part. But you have to win sometimes too.